Focus on the Family, one of the lead religious right groups, published an article yesterday, opposing adding gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity to the existing Hate Crimes law that already covers race, religion and national origin.
Under "hate-crimes" laws like H.R. 1913, pastors could be prosecuted for preaching the biblical view of homosexuality. Similar laws have been used to prosecute religious speech in the U.S. at the state level and abroad.That's an outright lie. The law covers violent acts. It doe not cover speech. No pastor is going to be prosecuted unless he's an accessory to murder. And I seriously hope Focus on the Family is not suggesting that their pastors now have the religious right to murder people they disapprove of.
"The homosexual activists' mantra is no longer tolerance — it's embrace and promote," said Ashley Horne, federal policy analyst at Focus on the Family Action. "Anything less will be silenced. Christians must speak up."
Second, Focus on the Family appears to be lying to its members about similar laws being used to prosecute religious speech. In Sweden, the only country they can point to, it was a "hate speech" law - a law that specifically regulated hateful speech directed at an entire class of citizens - that got a preacher in trouble (mind you, this is Europe we're talking about - they have a rather unique history of nasty men with mustaches using hate speech to kill millions). Regardless, we don't have hate speech laws in America, and if we did, they'd be unconstitutional and struck down by those "activist judges." The US Hate CRIMES law is about violent crimes, not about speech. And to the degree that anyone has tried to stifle speech under the US' existing hate crimes law, by filing a frivolous lawsuit, I'd love to hear about how successful those court cases have been. I'd be willing to bet that the religious right can't show one case where a pastor lost because he said something hateful in church.
Name the case, now.
It's all a lie in the name of God. Seems the far-right fundamentalists have learned something from their Mormon overseers (it's called Lying for the Lord, google it, it's a Mormon speciality).
Then there's this:
The legislation is also unnecessary.Wait, I'm confused. If there aren't that many hate crimes against gays, then how will there be a tsunami of cases where religious right preachers will be thrown into jail as a result of such crimes?
Whitehead cites FBI stats showing that of the nearly 1.5 million violent crimes in the U.S. in 2007, just 1,460 were reportedly based on "sexual orientation."
