Massachusetts’ senior senator is sponsoring a bill that would allow the federal government to prosecute crimes that are motivated by animus based on “race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability.” 

The bill, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1998, was introduced last November, and the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on it in July. 

At the hearings, Senator Kennedy argued that the killing of a black man in Jasper, Texas showed the need for the law. 

In the immediate aftermath of that murder, he issued a press release claiming that “The American people would be shocked to learn that this heinous crime may not be a federal crime.” 

Shortly after the Senate hearings, a South Carolina  woman who claimed to have been beaten because she was a lesbian, and whose story was used to promote a similar law in that state, was accused of staging the crimes herself. 

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby recently attacked “Kennedy’s destructive hate crimes bill,” saying that it “would expand federal criminal jurisdiction to a degree never before contemplated,” and “would stretch the definition of ‘hate crime’ far beyond what most Americans understand that term to mean.”  Jacoby concluded, “there is nothing a new federal hate crime law can supply that isn’t already in the Texas criminal code.” 

Similarly, a new book, Hate Crimes:  Criminal Law and Identity Politics,  argues that hate crime laws should be repealed, since they manipulate statistics, promote demagoguery, and create more hatred than they prevent.  Where hate crime laws have begun to be enforced, an inquisition results to establish bias as the motive for the crime. 

Two Northeastern professors recently argued in the Boston Globe, “Yes, we need hate crime laws,”  defending them against a  growing number of critics, and claiming that objections to the laws are based on "myths". 

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights strongly supports the legislation, and lists dozens of organizations who endorse it.  The legislation is of particular interest to homosexual organizations because it includes animus based on “sexual orientation.”  The Human Rights Campaign  is ardently in favor of its passage. 

Massachusetts has outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of sexual orientation, and a recent judgment awarded a lesbian almost one million dollars after she was fired. 
 
Return to front page.