By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
May 3 2007, 1:50 PM |
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The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted 236 to 180 to approve the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, marking the first time either house of Congress has passed a freestanding gay and transgender civil rights bill.
The vote came after a furious, 11th-hour opposition campaign by anti-gay groups and on the same day the White House issued a statement saying senior advisers would recommend that President Bush veto the measure.
“This is a historic day that moves all Americans closer to safety from the scourge of hate violence,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the national gay advocacy group that has coordinated efforts to pass the bill.
“Today, legislators sided with the 73 percent of the American people who support the expansion of hate crimes laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity,” he said.
The bill, H.R. 1592, would give the federal government authority to prosecute hate crimes that target people based on sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability. Under existing law, federal authorities already have the power to prosecute hate crimes based on race, color, national origin and religion.
Republican opponents warned that the bill would create a special class of people who would receive more federal protection from crimes that should be prosecuted by state and local authorities. Some called for adding senior citizens and members of the military to the protected class category, saying they, too, could be subject to crimes of hate.
“This bill is the wrong solution for an ideal goal,” said Rep. Mary Fallin (R-Okla.). “Violence produced by hate is already outlawed. Why would we as a nation want to divide our American citizens from being more worthy or less worthy of whatever protection the law could give them?” she said.
Fallin and other opponents argued that the bill would create a “chilling” effect on religious leaders, who would become fearful that they could be prosecuted for inciting anti-gay violence by preaching biblical verses critical of homosexuality.
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) said the bill’s lack of a specific definition of “sexual orientation” could lead to inadvertent legal protections for groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, which he said advocates for illegal sexual contact between adults and juveniles.
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chair of the House Judiciary Committee and floor manager of the bill, called such arguments “completely unfounded.” Conyers argued that the bill includes specific language banning any infringement of speech and noted that the groups included in the bill, including gays and transgender persons, historically have been subjected to violent crimes motivated by hate.
"Virtually every major law enforcement organization in the country has endorsed the bill, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National District Attorneys Association ... and 26 state attorneys general," he said.
Conyers said the bill would strengthen the existing federal hate crimes statute "in the same way that the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996 helped federal prosecutors combat church arson."
The House has twice approved hate crimes bills in recent years, with one including protection for gays and the other including protections for gays and transgender persons. But both were in the form of amendments to other bills. The Senate also has approved a hate crimes measure in a previous Congress as an amendment to another bill. All three measures died in House-Senate conference committees at the hands of Republican congressional leaders.
Activists said the version passed by the House this week became a landmark of sorts because it was the first civil rights measure approved by either house of Congress to include protections for gays or transgender persons.
“I view this as an extraordinary and historic milestone in our nation’s civil rights history as well as in the LGBT movement’s history,” said Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), the first open lesbian to be elected to Congress.
“The bill is a very powerful statement,” she said in a telephone press briefing after the vote. “The power that Congress has spoken out on this issue, the House of Representatives has spoken to add gender, gender identity, sexual orientation and disability to our nation’s hate crimes laws is very important.”
Baldwin and other supporters of the bill said they were pleased with the House vote, even though it fell mostly along partisan lines, with 212 Democrats and 25 Republicans voting for it and 14 Democrats and 166 Republicans voting against the bill. Sixteen House members – six Democrats and 10 Republicans – did not vote.
In an action viewed as a symbolic gesture of support, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) arranged for gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to serve as the House presiding officer while the final roll-call vote was taken on the measure.
“The bill is passed,” Frank said with a booming voice, seconds after he read the vote tally and pounded the gavel. His Democratic colleagues, standing on the floor before him, broke into applause.
The Senate will soon consider its own, identical version of the bill, renamed the Mathew Shepard Act in honor of the gay University of Wyoming student who was slain in a 1998 hate crime.
During the House debate, Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother, sat in the House visitor’s gallery beside HRC’s Solmonese and Dave O’Malley, a Laramie, Wyo., law enforcement official who investigated the Shepard murder.
The jubilant mood of activists backing the bill was tempered by the prospect of a presidential veto.
“The Administration favors strong criminal penalties for violent crimes, including crimes based on personal characteristics, such as race, color, religion, or national origin,” the White House statement said. “However, the Administration believes that H.R. 1592 is unnecessarily and constitutionally questionable. If H.R. 1592 were presented to the president, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” the statement said.
Supporters received a boost Wednesday afternoon, when the Democratic-controlled House Rules Committee adopted a proposed “closed” rule, which banned amendments to the bill. The full House approved the rule on Thursday in a party line vote, preventing opponents from introducing a flood of amendments aimed at weakening or nullifying the bill’s effect.
In the days leading up to the House debate and vote on the bill, HRC unleashed an unprecedented response to attacks against the legislation by conservative religious groups, according to HRC spokesperson Luis Vizcaino.
“As expected, the anti-gay, extremist organizations have geared up their machines of hate to pump out an avalanche of lies about the intent of this legislation,” Solmonese said in a statement before the vote.
Using videos on their respective web sites, along with the popular online video site YouTube, some of the anti-gay groups described the hate crimes measure as a “thought control” bill aimed at prosecuting preachers for citing biblical passages that portray homosexuality as a sin.
“This so-called hate crimes bill begins to lay the legal foundation and framework to investigate, prosecute and persecute pastors, business owners and anyone else whose actions are based upon, and reflect, the truths found in the Bible,” said Rev. Louis Sheldon, chair of the Traditional Values Coalition.
Last month, the anti-gay groups attacked the bill for its inclusion of protections for transgender persons victimized by hate crimes, saying the legislation would promote “cross-dressing” and “transsexualism.”
HRC responded by issuing a series of press releases by e-mail with a link to HRC’s posting of its own video on YouTube. The HR
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