A group called Faith 2 Action is rallying the troops to shoot down the hate crime extension bill coming before the Senate, possibly as early as June 15. It’s sending packets to senators urging them to defeat the bill on the grounds of free speech, even though the bill only adds time to sentences handed down for violent crimes. The mailing contains a mugshot, fingerprints, a picture of cuffed hands, and the headline “Don’t Make Me A Criminal.”
Jane Folger of the ministry http://www.f2a.org/">Faith 2 Action says the hate crimes bill passed by the House is aimed at pastors or anyone else who has the “audacity” to disagree with the homosexual agenda. “Mike is standing at a football bar, or he’s standing at a restaurant, watching a game,” she posits; “Bruce comes out of the restroom, and he’s touching up his makeup. He’s a cross-dresser with red nails and a five o’clock shadow. He comes out and hits on Mike. Maybe he puts his arm around him or maybe he brushes or puts his hand through his hair.
The average man would “maybe want to push off such unwelcome advances,” Folger observes. However, she warns, “That, if you touch him, is a hate crime.”
If you ever wondered why they call it homophobia, now you have an idea. What’s next, a congressional mailing of coloring books illustrating the horrors of marriage equality?
It’s beyond galling for those of us who actually believe in the First Amendment—even for hate speech—to hear it eulogized by those who gave up even their lip-service to it after 9/11, at about the same time that Ari Fleischer warned “watch what you do, watch what you say.”
Those in Congress who warn ominously of thought crimes had no trouble retroactively legalizing the administration’s illegal wholesale spying on Americans’ telephone conversations and emails—activities which are not exactly conducive to the free and open expression of thoughts. “If you haven’t done anything wrong,” Bush apologists blandly assert, “you have nothing to fear.” Free speech and privacy, as rights and goods in and of themselves, count as nothing.
How many Republicans who are now making impassioned arguments defending free speech came to the defense of the Dixie Chicks when their CDs were being pitched into bonfires and Clear Channel put them on a no-play list? How many work tirelessly to get “inappropriate” books off library shelves?
How many seconds pass before Bill O’Reilly tells an opponent to shut up and/or cuts her mic?
More importantly, how many movement conservatives protesting the new hate crime bill on free speech grounds heckled, harassed, and shouted down anyone who had the temerity to point out the administration’s transparent lies as we marched into Iraq? Free speech doesn’t mean much when you can’t be heard. Or seen—how many objected to the creation of “free speech zones” that pen peaceful demonstrators far from the person or place they’re protesting?
Far from believing in an equal, open exchange of ideas, the religious and political right believe very strongly that they have a lock on absolute truth; they disparage intellectual humility, tolerance, and evidence-based decision-making as “moral relativism.” These attitudes have eroded public support for all human rights, not just the right to free speech.
Most notable in that regard is the Bush administration’s notion of the unitary executive, which gives the president unprecedented power to declare citizens “enemy combatants” and strip them of all rights, including the right to physical safety—the ultimate penalty enhancement. During a recent debate among
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/140212">Republican presidential candidates, every one of them, with the honorable exception of Representative Ron Paul, eagerly endorsed the Guantanamo detention center and the torturing of suspects.
The audience’s thunderous applause was chilling. Cruelty has become anonymous, sanitized: respectable.
The other argument conservatives make against penalty enhancements is that they undermine the concept of equal protection under the law. According to this thinking, it would be un-American to add an additional terrorist penalty to the sentences of abortion clinic bombers, for example—and as far as I know, no pro-life murderers have had such a penalty added to their sentences.
Yet when Judge James Cohn handed down a five-year sentence for Stephen Jordi for attempted fire-bombing of a reproductive health clinic,
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/news-articles-press/politics-policy-issues/abortion-access/stephen-jordi-11566.htm">he added, “I have grave concerns regarding the future dangerousness of Mr. Jordi.” The prosecution argued that the remorseless Jordi should be sentenced as a terrorist, which would have doubled his sentence, but Cohn argued that under the law domestic acts could not be considered terrorism.
Unfortunately, Cohn’s legal scruples have not prevented an Oregon judge from
http://abcnews.go.com/US/Technology/story?id=3204939&page=1">sentencing two eco-activists as terrorists recently. This is the natural outcome of an
http://www.alternet.org/environment/26077?page=2">FBI decision to designate environmental and animal rights activists as the leading domestic terrorist threats, in spite of the fact that there has never been a life lost in any action taken by those groups. Unlike abortion clinic bombers, environmental and animal activists have made the preservation of human life a priority.
Yet there has been no outcry from conservatives against this dangerously broad use of penalty enhancements. As with their new-found passion for free speech, the right’s support for equal protection in sentencing seems partisan at best.
Which is not to say that hate speech is harmless. Far from it. Recently Eric Rudolph, who exploded a nail-packed bomb outside the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Alabama, made the news on this very subject. Rudolph made a deal to avoid the death penalty and is now using his constitutionally-protected free speech to taunt one of his victims, nurse Emily Lyons, from his prison cell. (Be forewarned,
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/51353/">this link contains extremely disturbing photos showing what Emily, a mother of two, has suffered from Rudolph’s vicious attack, including the loss of one eye.)
On a website set up by an Army of God admirer,
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,272160,00.html">Rudolph
recalls how Emily Lyons, in court, described the pain of her injuries and made an obscene gesture at Rudolph as she showed off a finger mangled by the blast. Rudolph writes: “It was a great speech and one that the denizens of freedom should be proud to enshrine in a museum somewhere. Perhaps they could put it next to MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream.’ They could call it ‘I Have a Middle Finger.’”
Rudolph also bombed
http://www.sovo.com/2005/8-26/news/localnews/bomb.cfm">a gay bar.
Jeff Lyons, Emily’s husband, worries that Rudolph, who is considered a “Hero of God” among anti-abortion fanatics, might incite further violence from his jail cell. It is certainly possible. And yet there’s no way to constrain Eric Rudolph’s free speech rights without compromising free speech for everyone.
I believe it would be both wrong and futile to try to solve the problem of rising hate by curtailing speech. But it would also be wrong—and dangerous—not to address the problem at all. Adding time to the sentences of criminals convicted of violently assaulting strangers simply because they are gay, or black, or work in an abortion clinic, is an eminently reasonable way to discourage further violence against vulnerable minorities while at the same time protecting free speech rights.
In other words, I support this extension of hate crime coverage precisely
because of the value I put on the First Amendment. Penalty enhancements allow us, as a society, to take a stand against radical intolerance at the point where vicious words escalate into beatings, cross-burnings, and bombings.
In the words of Dr. King, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”
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