Oct 30, 2009  |  By: KEVIN NAFF  | COMMENTS     

PRESIDENT OBAMA THIS week signed into law the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which becomes the nation’s first federal LGBT rights law after decades of trying.

Wednesday’s signing ceremony at the White House proved an emotional event for many who worked so hard since the brutal 1998 killings of Shepard and Byrd.

Hate crimes laws don’t have universal support, even among gay rights advocates. Indeed, you can make a compelling libertarian argument against such laws. But it’s unconscionable to exclude from an existing law a group so disproportionately impacted by hate crimes as LGBT people.

Current federal law covers attacks motivated by race, religion, national origin or color. The new law adds crimes committed based on sexual orientation, gender identity, sex or disability and includes a provision that makes it a federal crime to attack military service members.

Attacks on LGBT people remain far too common and perpetrators often invoke the “gay panic” defense to seek reduced sentences. In recent months, just here in D.C., we’ve seen the senseless killing of Tyli’a “NaNa Boo” Mack, a transgender woman stabbed to death in the middle of the afternoon while walking to a trans services center, and the gross miscarriage of justice in the case of Tony Randolph Hunter, who was beaten and died while walking to a local gay bar. His killer, Robert Lee Hanna, was sentenced to just six months in jail.

Those cases didn’t receive the national attention paid to Shepard’s gruesome murder, a fact that leads some critics to decry the disparity in media coverage between incidents when white gay men are killed and black gays or transgender women are victims. Indeed, the Blade’s pages have seen endless accounts of black gay and trans people killed over the years. Far too often those stories never find their way into the mainstream media. And when the national media pick up on such a story, reports will sometimes omit any reference to the victims’ sexual orientation.

In just one such case, three black college students were shot to death on a New Jersey playground in 2007. The incident grabbed national headlines when the story broke, but quickly faded from view after the Blade reported that at least one of the victims was gay and the group of friends had been en route to a Black Pride event in New York when they were shot.

There’s no question that attacks on black and trans victims are not widely reported. Despite that unfortunate fact, Shepard’s parents, Judy and Dennis, deserve much credit and praise for bringing such visibility to the scourge of anti-gay violence. They could have disappeared into their grief and no one would have blamed them. Instead, they got angry and organized and worked tirelessly through the bleak Bush years, when White House officials signaled the president would veto a hate crimes bill, to add LGBT people to the existing law.

It’s false to suggest this law will “protect” anyone from a crime. No law can accomplish that feat. LGB — and especially T — people will continue to face violence. But now we are recognized at the federal level as equal to other groups under the law. It’s a small step, one made smaller by the fact that the bill didn’t pass on its own merit but had to be attached to a Pentagon spending bill to squeak through Congress.

With LGBT people now treated equally under the federal hate crimes law, our advocates can move on to new challenges, like passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act.