Rep. Jo Bonner On Federal Hate Crimes Statute
Rep. Jo Bonner (R-AL District 1) tried this week to explain his opposition to HR 1592, which adds sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability to the hate crimes law that has been in effect since 1969, and provides resources to states that prosecute these crimes. He parroted the new party line that a crime is a crime and intent doesn’t matter, which might come as a surprise to the prosecutors and judges who have considered intent in charging and punishing crime since time immemorial. But these two statements belong in the “Is this bad editing, or did he really say that?” file:
If this legislation becomes law, it would supersede current laws punishing perpetrators of the underlying crimes. In some cases, such hate crime laws would supersede Alabama laws making it impossible to impose capital punishment when a hate crime has been committed.
Under this bill, a criminal who kills a person in one of the “protected” categories will be punished more harshly than criminals who kill a police officer, a member of the military, or any other person not in this “protected” category.
So which is it? The law might stop Alabama from going for the death penalty to punish a hate crime, but at the same time it would allow a hate crime to be punished more severely than a cop killing (which, btw, is one of those crimes that already leads to harsher sentences than one one involving an ordinary citizen)? I’m not sure how one could hold both contradictory thoughts in one’s brain at the same time.
If Rep. Bonner opposes hate crime laws, perhaps he should propose repealing them in their entirety. Then he should go after other laws that punish crimes against certain victims more harshly than others (see killing of law enforcement officers above, or perhaps terrorism). For some reason, I doubt he’ll do that. The political cost would be too high. But excluding gays from the law? That’s a no-brainer for far too many people.
(I have to give Bonner some credit; at least he didn’t pull out the “criminalizing Christianity” card.)
hat tip, Blues reader Howard
May 15th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
He either needs to buy a comma or a relative pronoun or both. I’d have to read the laws (I assume HE has) to see whether he’s trying to say that a) We’ve got laws now that let us execute somebody who kills a gay man, but the new “hate crime” law does not include capital punishment as an option so would actually weaken our current penalty, or b) we’ve got laws letting us execute cop-killers but not gay-killers, but the new law would make us execute the gay-killers but not necessarily the cop-killers, which means that a cop-killer might get off more lightly than a gay-killer, which would be wrong.
Now my head hurts.
May 15th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
“Now my head hurts.”
Mine too, Del.