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January 16, 2007
Dem Wants to Federalize Inequality Before the Law
Posted by Dave Blount at January 16, 2007 9:16 PM
In a frightening example of what we can expect of the new Democrat Congress, the atrocious Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) has introduced a bill that would extend federal authority over so-called "hate crimes" — i.e., crimes that Dems hate because the victim belongs to one of the special interest groups they favor at the expense of everyone else, primarily non-Caucasians, homosexuals, and Muslims.
High-toned verbiage about how thou shalt not commit crimes "motivated by the actual or perceived race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability of the victim" inevitably boils down in actual application to a simple principle: it may be bad to assault someone, but it's worse to assault someone who is liable to vote Democrat. As usual, the real discrimination is directed against normal people — and the real victim is civil society, which rests on the concept that we are all equal before the law.
Needless to say, Jackson-Lee's bill violates the Constitution, but that's unlikely to prevent its passage. For example, the Tenth Amendment is easily skirted with this preposterous argument:
Such violence affects interstate commerce in many ways … instrumentalities of interstate commerce are used to facilitate the commission of such violence.
"Such violence" refers to violence where the victim is a person of color, a person of gayness, a person of Islamicness, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
Beyond the obvious hyperextension of federal authority and the equally obvious practical result of creating a legal caste system, the bill also assaults free speech. It addresses violent crime, but could easily lead to federal punishment for speech that "offends" privileged groups. Similar legislation has criminalized criticism of homosexuality in Canada.
The utility of the bill lies in its vagueness. If pretty much anything liberals don't like can be called racist, then anything they don't like can be called a hate crime. As Ted Pike of the National Prayer Network notes:
It will be up to judges … to begin to interpret and adjudicate from the bench and inevitably they broaden out the definition of a hate crime.
The same moonbats who sentence child rapists to wrist slaps out of sheer depravity may some day throw you in jail for implying that you don't like it when Muslims fly planes into skyscrapers.
