April 30, 2009

Just What America Needs: More Hate Crime Legislation

We can't even enforce the thousands of federal laws on the books, yet Congress just passed new "hate crimes" legislation even though states already prohibit the very crimes being "outlawed". STACLU:

The bill’s supporters, such as the National Center for Lesbian Rights and the ACLU, claim the law is needed because of the case of Angie Zapata. Zapata is a transgender woman whose lover killed her when he found out she was biologically a man. But this argument makes little sense, given that Zapata’s killer was swiftly convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole by a Colorado state court, which found the killer guilty of both murder and hate crimes. (The federal hate crimes bill does not provide for the death penalty, and its maximum penalty is the same one that Zapata’s killer got: life without parole).

The bill’s Senate sponsors named the 2008 version of the bill after Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was killed in Wyoming. That was a cynically clever strategy. Hate-crimes laws are fairly popular: 45 states have hate crimes laws, and most of them ban hate-crimes based on sexual orientation.

Read the rest here.

It's as if these things called "states" were a foreign concept to liberals.

By Rusty Shackleford, Ph.D. at 02:06 PM | |