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President Barack Obama has signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act tacked onto which was the hate crimes legislation.
Sen. Harry Reid, our brave Democratic majority leader, slipped the hate crimes bill into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have our senators consider the controversial hate crimes bill on its own.
It’s for good reason that our Democratic 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 it does.
The bill adds extra penalties to violent crimes when they are deemed motivated by gender, sexual orientation, or disabilities. It’s the first major expansion of hate crimes legislation originally passed in 1968, targeted then to crimes aimed at race, color, religion, and national origin.
After signing this new law, Obama celebrated it by saying that we should “embrace our differences.”
But law isn’t about embracing differences. It is about providing equal and non-arbitrary protection to all.
Equal protection for every 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 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 the murder of another citizen, is a horror that 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.
Can you imagine a football game where the penalty for roughing the passer is 20 yards rather than 15 if the referee concludes that the violence was motivated because the quarterback was homosexual?
It should be clear that hate crime law has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. It is something that should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society.
We already have a source that instructs against murder and to love your neighbor as yourself. But it has been banned from our schools and public spaces.
So again, in what is becoming our godless nation, we mistake the disease for the cure.
Star Parker, an author and president of CURE, the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education, can be reached at parker@urbancure.org.
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