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Articles on "Hate Crimes" Laws
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Would
Hate Crimes Laws Make You a Lawbreaker?
Ominous
legislation now before Congress contains a hidden agenda that could make
criminals of Christians.
In
1988 an evangelical pastor in Sweden opened his Bible to the story of
Sodom and Gomorrah. He informed his congregation (which included
homosexuals) that God is still angry at sexual perversion and will judge
those who practice it. Several
months later, this pastor was serving a four-week sentence in jail. He had
violated Sweden’s “Anti-Hate” statute, a law that protects groups
such as homosexuals from “verbal violence" — public statements
which might cause them embarrassment because of their sexual orientation. It
is well known that socialist Sweden is the trendsetter in human
engineering. What happens there will probably be taken for granted through
much of the world 10 or 15 years later. But
laws in America banning criticism of others? “It can’t happen,” most
will reply. “ Not with free speech guaranteed by the Constitution!” But
it can. A hidden agenda toward ultimately restraining free speech surfaced
among bills introduced this year in Congress. “Hate Crime” legislation
was proposed as a first step toward banishing “prejudice” in America.
This bill, deceptively titled "The Local Law Enforcement Enhancement
Act of 2000" passed the Senate, but was voted down in the House. Had
it passed, it could have laid the foundation for an “Anti-Hate”
bureaucracy identical to Sweden’s—a bureaucracy which would redefine
“prejudice” so as to make the Christian a lawbreaker. Here’s how our
free speech is coming under attack:
Let's
briefly review how today's anti-hate legislation, currently before
Congress, came into being. During
1988, the predominant architect of “Anti-Hate” legislation, the Jewish
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, helped sponsor a nationwide,
law-student competition to write a model “Anti-Hate” law for America.
This law would criminalize not just physical acts of racial violence but
statements that might lead to violence. On
April 20-22, the ADL helped sponsor a conference at New York’s
prestigious Hofstra University entitled “Group Defamation and Freedom of
Speech: The Relationship Between Language and Violence.” Rep. John
Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich), also a pioneer of the hate crimes legislation now
before Congress, was the keynote speaker. The winner of the hate crimes
competition was announced as Joseph Ribakoff, a law student from Whittier
College in California. In
his prize-winning proposal, Ribakoff asserted that with the upsurge of
“Hate Crimes” in America, it will no longer suffice for the government
merely to outlaw acts of physical violence; it must ban those forms of
verbal communication which cause hatred, suspicion, and possible violence
against groups of people. Ribakoff recommends that federal and state
censorship boards be established to review all films and videotapes before
they are shown publicly, determining if they contain statements which
might stimulate hatred or contempt for some group of people. If so, an
immediate court order would ban the film in America. Ribakoff: “Any
person, persons, or organizations which publicly shows a film or movie
before it has been submitted and reviewed by the agency shall have
committed a misdemeanor.” Further,
if anyone is a member of an organization that has publicly shown such a
film and intends to remain a member, supportive of its goals, he also will
have committed a misdemeanor.
Anti-Hate
Bureaucracy
Although
the participants in the Hofstra Conference were divided concerning the
feasibility of such blatant censorship, the ADL remains determined that
some kind of anti-hate legislation become law—even if it is only
rudimentary. Thus, the ADL helped to create the "Hate Crimes
Statistics Act."1 Here are the specifics as it was
submitted to Congress in 1990.
The
“Hate Crimes Statistics Act” requires states to determine if crimes
committed under their jurisdiction were motivated by prejudice. These
include serious crimes, but also such relatively minor offenses as
“vandalism, trespass and threat.” States are required to relay such
information to a federal anti-hate data bank, then to be shared with law
enforcement officials throughout the nation. Thus,
if a homosexual is the victim of an offense as minor as “vandalism,
trespass or threat,” states are forced to determine if the offense were
motivated by prejudice—a tedious task. If so, details of the
homosexual’s case are to be forwarded to the federal government. If the
person or group who committed the crime had not yet been found, the
government’s policy of sharing information concerning the case with
state and local agencies might help to apprehend such persons.2
Thus the long arm of the federal government could come to the aid of a
homosexual victim in a way that would be out of the question for victims
of crimes not motivated by prejudice. A
second bill establishes a “Commission on Racially Motivated Violence,”
a blue-ribbon panel of 12 members which would receive statistics from the
states, define what constitutes “violence” and “prejudice,” and
report their findings to the President. This panel would dramatize on a
national level the problem of violence against gays and other minorities. Only
The Beginning
The
ADL-assisted "Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990" was passed by
Congress soon after the Hofstra conference. Law enforcement nationwide is
now required to report incidents of "hate crimes" for federal
review. Yet,
the ADL wants the Justice department to do more than simply record data,
it wants federal prosecution of those who "hate." Until now this
was not fully possible because the federal government lacks authority to
intervene in law enforcement within the states (except for interstate
crimes, voting fraud, etc.) The
"Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2000" attempted to
vastly increase the government's right to investigate and prosecute
"hate crimes" everywhere. Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR), a
co-sponsor, with Sen. Edward Kennedy, of this bill, told me in a letter
that this legislation "extends the authority of federal prosecution
to crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, and disability." Clearly,
this bill would have been a stepping stone toward an anti-hate bureaucracy
where Christian teachings which condemn sodomy will be considered
"hateful," and "inciting to violence," and thus
illegal. While
posing as the arch-defender of free speech, the ADL has a proven record of
subtly working to limit it. Ultimately, the ADL may pressure the
“Commission on Racially Motivated Violence” to extend the term “Hate
Crime” to include “hurtful words” against a minority. Anyone who
heckled a marcher in a “Gay Pride” parade would then have committed a
criminal act. Anyone who caused “intense anguish” to Jews by accusing
their forefathers of the “crucifixion of God” could be indicted.
Under
such laws, Dr. Paul Cameron, nationally recognized opponent of gay rights,
made arrangements for a public lecture in Canada in which the homosexual
lifestyle would be criticized. When he arrived at the border, the cases of
books and literature he brought with him were impounded. He was told that
in Canada it is against the law to humiliate homosexuals publicly. Focus
on Hate
As
“anti-hate” legislation is introduced, and reintroduced, into
Congress, the media are focusing as never before on the problem of racial
violence, holding up the Aryan Nations, the Klan, and the Skinheads, as
examples of what society should outlaw. Yet it is you and I, thinking
Christians of a conservative bent of mind, who are in danger of being
silenced While
gays, communists, abortionists, radical feminists, etc. are not seen as
those who “hate,” every kind of “right winger” from Jerry Falwell
to “The Order” is increasingly, perceived as a source of “hurtful
words.” In fact, Christianity itself is coming under scrutiny. A widely
distributed book called “Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the
Survivalist Right” by James Coates3 accuses fundamentalist
Christianity of providing an unwholesome seedbed out of which intolerance
emerges. This reflects the common Jewish belief that Christianity, by its
charge that the Jews and their leaders were behind the crucifixion of
Christ, has caused more “mental anguish” to the Jews than anything
else in the history of the world. Although an extremist in Israeli
politics, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s view of Christianity was similar to
Coates’: "I
have not the slightest sympathy for Christianity or Jesus. As a believing
Jew, not only is Jesus not “God” but also he is neither Messiah nor
prophet. For the Jew he was a blasphemer, one who attacked the Torah as
unchanging divine law and who was a false prophet and heretic. “As
for Christianity, this is the faith that, in the name of Jesus, has made
life for the Jewish people a living hell for 19 centuries. In its name,
and in the name of Jesus, millions of Jews were massacred and the agony of
life under Christians can never be sufficiently described in all its
horror.”4 Coates
maintains that a literal interpretation of the criticism of New Testament
pits the fundamentalist Christian against the Jew. Thus, there is no real
substance to the claim of televangelists such as Robertson and Falwell
that the church wants to “bless” Israel. Coates: “The
resulting “Pro-Semitism” voiced by so much of the liberal right is not
much more comforting than the Anti-Semitism spewing from the mouths of the
survivalist right… Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of
American Hebrew Congregations, told an audience in San Francisco in late
1980 that it was “no coincidence that the rise of right-wing Christian
fundamentalism has been accompanied by the most serious outbreak of
Anti-Semitism in America since the outbreak of World War II.”5
At
this stage in time, the Jewish ADL tells us we need anti-hate laws to
protect the Blacks from whites, the gays from straights, the Jews from
Nazis. Many fear that what they really want is a law that will silence
forever the historic Christian claim that Jews were behind the crucifixion
of Christ, and that Jews must now accept him as Savior to escape damnation
(Acts 2:23, 36, 3:13-15, 4:10). Once broad anti-hate legislation is in
place, forbidding criticism of “identifiable groups,” it will be a
small matter to convince humanity (and Congress) that this ultimate
“group libel” should be forbidden. The New Testament, the authority
behind that charge, would of course also be censored. Who
is Prejudiced?
A
major reason why this legislation is so dangerous is that “prejudice,”
the condition it claims to oppose, is extremely ambiguous. For example, a
minister would not think it a form of prejudice to warn a homosexual from
his deviant, soul-damning lifestyle. Yet gay rights groups and the ADL
would. Whose
definition of prejudice would the government follow if these bills became
law? The
testimony of the ADL before Congress makes it clear that the ADL is
pushing hard for national acceptance of its definitions The ADL would
prefer that: Federal
definitions of “prejudice” should be modeled after the point of view
of the ADL Law
enforcement personnel should defer to ADL definitions of prejudice when
filling out reports on criminal investigations Law
enforcement personnel should submit themselves to ADL-led sensitivity
training, making them compliant with ADL definitions prejudice Investigating
officers should be allowed to determine before trial if the accused is
motivated by prejudice. (This would set up the local police, assisted by
ADL guidelines, as a sort of preliminary jury, opining on matters usually
relegated to the psychologist. This power over the accused is very ominous
because... If
prejudice is determined, the crime should be considered much more serious,
with a stiffer sentence. Hidden
Motives
Clearly,
this legislation is an opportunity for the ADL to intimidate and
manipulate Americans. As stated earlier the ADL exerted relentless
pressure upon the Canadian government to ban “group defamation.” They
succeeded. Now it is illegal in Canada to rebuke homosexuality publicly,
or even to publicly state that gays have a higher rate of AIDS than anyone
else. In America, the ADL is working even harder. Their initial intention
is not to ban free speech entirely, but to convince us that certain forms
of speech can be outlawed without doing violence to freedom of expression
in general. Incredibly,
despite its Orwellian overtones, this legislation has encountered little
significant opposition. Few recognize it as the foundation upon which a
system of police state spying and censorship can be built. Although the "Local Law Enforcement Act of 2000" was voted down, the ADL will introduce a similar bill, with a different title, in the next session of Congress. Now is the time to protest. Inform your senators and congressmen that existing laws adequately criminalize all forms of slander and violence. Not only would anti-hate legislation be costly (up to ten million annually) but, if ADL requests are followed, it would allow “Big Brother” to probe the “motivational” mindset of Americans unconvicted of crimes – a very dangerous, and far reaching precedent. by Theodore Winston Pike Footnotes:I.
Legal counsel for the House Subcommittee on Criminal Justice (Conyer’s
committee) told me that the ADL had been extremely helpful in the creation
of The Hate Crimes Statistics Act. 2.
Rep. John Conyers, Jr. (author of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act)
in testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, June 21,
1988 said that the Hate Crimes Statistics Act”. . can lead to increased
interagency sharing of intelligence information on the criminal activities
of hate groups.” 3.
Coates, James. Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist
Right, Hill and Wang, New York, 1987. 4.
Rabbi Meir Kahane, The Jewish Press, New York, Jan. 6, 1989, pp.
49, 54. 5.
Coates, p. 257. 6.
Statement of Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith on 5 797, S
702, and 5 2000, before the Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the
Constitution, United States Senate, June 21, 1988. Back To "Anti-Hate" Laws Homepage
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