Bush backs hate

George Bush has pledged to veto any bill with the Matthew Shepard Act (MSA) attached to it (via Joe.My.God). JMG quotes White House spokesperson Tony Fratto as saying:

The qualifications [in the bill] are so broad that virtually any crime involving a homosexual individual has potential to have hate crimes elements. The proposals they're talking about are not sufficiently narrow.

That, of course, is either ill-informed nonsense or a deliberate lie. What’s really going on here? Does George Bush back hate—or is he merely pandering to the frothing extreme right christianists in his party? Certainly he’s pandering, as he always does when he can (as when he and Karl Rove federalised the issue of same sex marriage to use as a wedge issue to divide America).

The far right opposes the bill because it treats GLBT Americans as deserving dignity and respect. Their excuse for opposing it, however, is simpler: They claim that it’ll forbid free speech, which is a lie being deliberately spread by extremist christianist organisations in the US. The media has so often repeated the lie that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) had to issue a special alert to journalists. It quotes one of the bills sponsors, Senator Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon) as saying:

This act is about the prosecution of crime, not prohibition of speech. Unless they believe part of their religion is the practice of violence against others, they should not be affected by this bill.

Others have pointed out that similar hate crimes legislation exist in many states and no church has ever been prosecuted for speech, no matter how anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-racial minority, etc. The reason is simple: The act doesn’t try to prohibit any speech—it can’t, actually, since the free speech protections of the First Amendment to the US Constitution trumps all.

Democrats in Congress don’t have enough votes to over-ride any presidential veto, and they’ll promptly remove the MSA from anything Bush vetoes—if it can get past Republican filibustering in the first place. It’s been suggested that Democrats should attach the MSA to every bill it sends to Bush, but they won’t do that, of course.

So, in the end, the backers of hate will triumph—for now. The hope is that the 2008 US elections will sweep aside every remnant of the current regime and those in Congress who back it so strongly. Until then, a word of advice to the Bushies: You’re either with us, or you’re on the side of hate. But, then, they may have heard that kind of wording somewhere before.