Published: June 22, 2009 12:11 pm      

New hate crime bill is misguided

By now most Americans are aware of the tragic story of Matthew Shepard, the 21-year-old Wyoming man who in 1998 was savagely tortured, tied to a fence in a rural area and left to die. The villains in this story are Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney who pretended to befriend Shepard by offering him a ride home. Unfortunately, these two ne’er-do-wells had decided their victim was a homosexual and, for that reason, did not deserve to live.

That the mindset that led to Shepard’s death is despicable and heinous is a consensus shared by any right thinking person. There is not a prison sentence long enough for murderers like this, or an electric chair with voltage enough, to provide the kind of justice appropriate to apply to those who would do such a thing.

Shepard is dead. As a human being his civil rights were violated in the most comprehensive manner possible. Likewise, his killers deserve no less treatment.

But it is wrong to single this out as a crime deserving of its own classification, as Sen. Ted Kennedy proposed with his “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act,” which adds gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability to the federal hate crimes statutes. Current law covers race, color, religion and national origin only.

Codifying this brand of hate has the effect of making it equal to those who kill others because of race. One would be hard pressed to find African Americans who equate discrimination their ancestors and, to some extent, they themselves suffered from centuries of slavery to today, with that of homosexuals.

All murder starts with hate and is therefore a “hate” crime. It makes no sense to differentiate between kinds of hate. Doing so does not make the perpetrator anymore guilty or his victim any less dead.