Last week, the House passed a bill to support improved prosecution of hate crimes. The vote was mostly on party-line (as usual), and President Commander Guy has threatened a veto. Among the Dems voting to keep Hate in circulation was Brad Elsworth (D-
"Hate crimes" are, of course, a bugbear for the right in general and the Christian Right in particular, who apparently believe such laws would cause them to be liable if someone takes one of their anti-gay sermons as an inspiration to help populate the Devil's housing colony. There is a rich irony here, from many of the same goody-two-shoes who support invasiveness because "innocent people have nothing to worry about" suddenly are singing a different tune when it's their own lives under scrutiny. (Here's some of the more ridiculous paranoia from the Traditional Values Coalition.)
This is not, however, the best irony in play here. As usual, slacktivist has done most of the heavy lifting, but I will summarize his main point here. Hate crimes, essentially, are a kind of terrorism. They are punished more severely because they are not crimes against only one person. When two jocks rough up a guy outside a bar for being uncomfortably femme for their liking, the implicit message to all similar people is that they are putting themselves in jeopardy of violence just for being who they are.
At this point, it should no longer be surprising to anyone that, even though the right is ostensibly preoccupied with terrorism, they haven't the first idea what "terrorism" actually comprises. "Terrorism" for them is little more than a euphemism for "insidious brown people." For some time it was quite easy--and it still may be--to get apparently reasonable people to claim only Arabic-looking people should be subjected to searching at airports, because "Arabs are the only people blowing up buildings," oblivious apparently to Timothy McVeigh and, more recently, the crackpot trying to blow up a women's health center in Austin, TX with a pipe bomb (made from supplies bought from Soviet-Mart, no less!).
Update: Joe Donnelly, the other Indiana congressman who voted against the bill, is on Bilerico today to
