Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Hate Crimes Bill

Recently in Colorado a bill was passed to, in effect, outlaw hate crimes. It is meant to protect people from being discriminated against because of religion, race, or sexual orientation. It prohibits people from,“displaying in any way, manner, or shape or by any means or method…any communication, paper, book, pamphlet…notice, or advertisement of any kind…that is intended or calculated to discriminate or actually discriminates….” This is a very scary bill indeed. Can you see how it attacks our very freedom of speech? And who is to determine what is "calculated to discriminate"? There are those who feel that this could escalate to the printing of certain passages in the Bible. I'm not sure it would escalate to that point, because religion is one of the groups supposedly protected by this bill, but you can see how the interpretation of it could escalate to include religious beliefs. Would churches in the future be forced to allow things in their religion that might otherwise have been unaccepted? It's hard to say, but the frightening part is that Obama backs these "hate crime" bills. It's a scary world today.

4 comments:

deputymomof6 said...

Yeah, that wording is not good at all. Though there may be a need for a bill to prevent hate crimes, the actions they are trying to prevent are already illegal. What a better option is would be to be able to bump up the severity of the crime already in place up a degree if you can prove that the crime was committed as a hate crime. And look up Obama's wife's thesis on snopes.com. Scary!! She wrote it under her maiden name... Michelle DiVaughn Robinson... I think. I am reciting her name from memory, which is not so good, anymore!!!

Native Minnow said...

I guess I fail to see why anyone would be against an anti-discrimination bill.

Delirious said...

I guess I didn't explain myself very well. It isn't that I'm against anti-discrimination. It's that this bill in particular takes away one of the most important of our freedoms, which is freedom of speech. The way this bill is written leaves much open to interpretation.

JJJ said...

Cant say i get this bill at all. I would have to see the entire boring humdrum thing to get a jist of all the (exceptions) man that must have some really off the wall rider bills no one wants to see "voted no on hate crimes!"
Crime is Crime if its done out of need, passion, discrimination, or anything else you can think to add into this. The penalty should be the same, Others wise your setting up a situation where criminals will only target their own race/religion/nationality to lessen the crime charge. Another good example of this is, if you kill a cop or non cop, your sentence is higher for the cop. Does this mean the cops life is worth more then a non cop? (and yes i know its there to try and curve criminals from killing cops) But the base line idea is wrong.
Yes, there needs to be laws where as you cant have no Negro signs like in the past, But a crime, robbery, murder, arson, what ever should all be equally charged.
Thats my two and half cents.