A Hateful Hate-Crimes
Law
By Star Parker
On October 28th, President Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate
Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act tacked
onto which was the hate-crimes legislation.
Senator Harry Reid, our brave Democrat Majority
Leader, slipped the hate-crimes bill into the Defense Authorization Bill to avoid having to 
have
our senators consider the controversial hate-crimes legislation on its own.
It’s for good reason that our Democrat legislators
wanted to hide under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation.
It may help them with the far-left wing of their party. But weakening and
damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is exactly
what this new hate-crimes law does.
After signing this new law, President Obama celebrated it by saying that in this nation we should
“embrace our differences.”
But law isn’t about embracing our differences.
It is about providing equal and non-arbitrary protection to all citizens.
Equal protection for every individual
American under the law is what the 14th
Amendment to our Constitution,
passed after the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee
seriously – that there are no classes of individuals that are treated
differently under the law – has been a justifiable obsession of blacks.
A society in which all life is not valued
the same, where murder of one citizen is not the same as murder of another
citizen, is a horror which black Americans have known too well. So it is a
particular irony that this major expansion of the politicization of our law has
been signed by our first black president.
What could it possibly mean that the penalty
for the same act of violence – for murder – may be different depending on what
might be deemed to be the motivation? Can you imagine a football game where the
penalty for roughing the passer is 20 yards rather than 15 if the referee
‘thinks’ that the violence perpetrated was motivated because the quarterback
was homosexual? Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have codified
that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has committed
adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has slandered or robbed? Isn’t
the point murder?
Can we really believe that someone capable
of murder is less likely to do so if the victim is a homosexual and the
penalties are greater than for the reasons above?
It should be clear that this hate-crime law
has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored
political classes – something that should be hateful to everyone who cares
about a free society, and particularly hateful to those, such as blacks, who
have been so victimized by politicization of law.
How about the sad and pathetic recent murder
of a 16-year-old Christian black honor student in Chicago by four teenage thugs
who were also black? A hate crime? Black-on-black
homicides that are tearing up our inner cities. Hate crimes?
The social breakdown that produces the
disproportionate violence in black America is the product of the same moral
relativism and politicization of law that has produced hate-crime bills.
We already have a Source [the Bible] that instructs against murder and
to love your neighbor as yourself. But this has been banned from our schools
and our public spaces.
So once again, in what is becoming our God-less
nation, we mistake the disease for the cure.
Star
Parker is a syndicated columnist, author of
White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay and several
other books. She is also the president of CURE ,the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education and
may be reached via E-mail at parker@urbancure.org.
