26 April, 2009

Haters Freak Over Hate Crimes Legislation

Hate crimes legislation is on the way to becoming a reality, and the right-wing haters are livid:

We're finally making progress on passing a federal hate-crimes bill: On Thursday, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Protection Act passed out of the House Judiciary Committee.

Sure enough, as Kyle at RightWingWatch predicted, the right-wing freakout has begun. Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck is already leading the way.

He invited on wingnut talk-show host Sandi Rios, who promptly declared hate crimes "thought crimes" (uh-huh, right). She also attacked Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, who was defending the bill from Republican attempts to nullify it by adding categories or victims by claiming:

Rios: Well, she's saying that anybody that's killed or harmed is not a real victim -- unless they're homosexual or gay or Jewish. Then they're real victims. So you can murder more severely if they happen to homosexual or Jewish. It makes no sense.

Beck: Whatever happened to equal protection under the law? If you kill someone, you should go to jail!

Well, Glenn, that's true. And people do in fact go to jail for killing people - unless of course they're rich, powerful, and killing folks under the aegis of "national security" or poisonous corporations. What you fucktards don't seem to get is that under law, there are aggravating factors to a crime. Kill someone in legitimate self-defense, and you don't get treated the same way as someone who kills for monetary gain. Kill someone in a particularly heinous way, and you're likely to get a harsher sentence. What this legislation says is that there's another aggravating factor when you kill someone because you don't like their religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. The majority of us think that people who kill other people for those reasons are dangerous enough to be treated a little bit more harshly under the law. Society's also sending the message that certain crimes are more serious when they're used to terrorize people for those factors.

Not that you Cons are sane enough to understand this.

1 comment:

Biggles said...

Separate but unequal protection is unconstitutional. And, it stratifies the valuation of life, a position that if the govt takes, is illegal.

Therefore I am encouraged by the bill that will give enough rope to the democrats to hang themselves before the next election. Go ahead, pass it all. Hehehee.