Republicans vote against defense spending in order to give legal cover to violent hate-motivated criminals

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26 October 2009 :: Denver Lessing

The Republican party has adopted one of the most mind-bending political stances seen in recent times: after decades of defaming every Democrat, every liberal of any kind, progressive politics in general and anyone who opposes their party’s line, as “weak on defense” or “soft on crime”, often using the most convoluted rhetoric to make the defamatory claims, 28 Republican senators and 131 Republican House members have now voted to cut off funding for the US military in order to give special rights to violent criminals driven by hate.

These 159 Republicans in Congress voted against the Defense funding authorization bill, because it included the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands federal hate crimes law to punish attacks motivated by bias against gays. Some Republicans said their opposition was not to passing a hate crimes extension but to attaching it to a Defense spending bill. But how many of those Congresmen objected to procedural abuses when the Republican majority called midnight votes and neglected to even inform Democrats?

Astonishingly, a significant number of Republicans actually used extremist rhetoric to express what seems to be sympathy for bigots and murderers. Todd Tiahrt, a Republican representative from Kansas who opposed the hate crimes bill said it was “a cowardly move by far left Democrats to use this bill as a vehicle for their radical views.” Radical views? Rep. Tiahrt is actually making the argument that it is a “radical view” that in the United States a person should not be brutally murdered due to his or her sexual orientation.

Tiahrt railed against the idea of punishing anti-gay violence, saying the legislation creates a special class of victim and gives them more rights “than a veteran or a pregnant woman”. His choice of “veteran” and “pregnant woman” as rhetorical flourish appears to be designed to suggest that gays are not worth to society what veterans and pregnant women are, not capable of such implicit heroism or vulnerable generosity and therefore somehow less deserving of protection from random acts of cruelty and violence.

Tiahrt says in his view “every crime is a hate crime”, but what he utterly fails to understand is that hate crimes laws are not designed to give special treatment to any particular group, but rather to take note of the “special” negative treatment they receive, by being subject to bias and related violence, and try to ensure that the law rules out any justification for using bias to harm those individuals. The point is to return to them the dignity and equality stripped away by hate-driven attacks.

Rep. Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, voted against the Defense authorization act specifically stating his sympathy for people whose illegal actions are driven by hate. He questioned the very idea of hate crimes legislation of any kind, suggesting it violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection before the law. Rep. Jones apparently shares Rep. Tiahrt’s confusion over whether the average person is routinely subject to violent hate, but endures it due to a devotion to protecting the rights of violent hate-motivated criminals.

In both cases, these Congressmen are arguing not against the principle of hate crimes legislation, but against the principle of a democratic society being able define and punish criminal acts at all. According to their argument, it is unfair and unconstitutional to class hate crimes differently from other crimes, which means it would be unfair to class intentional murder differently from accidental manslaughter or to class mass murder as different from painting graffiti on the crumbling walls of abandoned buildings.

These extremists seem to be arguing that a murderer’s intent is not relevant to the crime in question; why should a murderer be deprived of the freedoms enjoyed by someone convicted of minor vandalism, or indeed how can we justify meting out any punishment whatsoever, when so many millions of citizens enjoy the legal “privilege” of never having been charged with a crime and so are “arbitrarily” allowed to remain free?

That this perversion of reason is part of the Republican attack on hate-crimes legislation is made all the more evident by the repeated allegation that preventing or punishing random acts of violence driven by hate is a “radical social agenda”. Rep. Jones even expressly stated that he believes the Republican party has no room at all for such opposition to violent hate, calling such efforts “one party’s radical social agenda”.

Jones also issued a statement containing numerous fabrications and distortions, such as his claim that “The ‘Hate Crimes’ provisions raise the possibility that religious leaders or members of religious groups could be prosecuted criminally based on their speech or other protected activities”. The legislation does not punish thought, but rather acts of violence or cruelty rooted in hate, or in a campaign of hate designed to incite violence. Jones is lying.

What’s more, Jones’ statement is absurd on its face, because no law can punish “protected activities”. Constitutional protections can be eroded, or inappropriately repealed, as under several provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, but Constitutional protections by definition outweigh any lower-level legislation. The US Constitution can be ignored, and hijacked, as when Congress voted to approve war in Iraq on totally false premises (a vote for which Jones has begged forgiveness from God, literally), but protected activities remain protected.

The distortions put out by those who seek to give cover to violent hate, and whose views, like Jones’, are so extreme as to cause them to vote against an entire fiscal year’s Defense authorization —which Jones feebly claims he supports by arguing that he wrote provisions of the bill he ultimately voted against— are disturbing in the extreme, because these individuals actually believe it is rational and justifiable to privilege the protection of violent hate above the adequate provision for our military men and women’s needs, or they just don’t want to make the effort to explain otherwise.