Christians claim hate crimes law an effort to 'eradicate' their beliefs
From Newsweek:
A Christian group in Michigan has filed a lawsuit alleging that a package of hate crimes laws named after murder victim Matthew Shepard is an affront to their religious freedom.Far from the intended purpose of severely punishing criminals who commit unspeakable acts against a persecuted minority group, the religious activists claim the laws are a guarded effort to "eradicate" their beliefs.
Filed by the Thomas More Law Center -- which bills itself as the religious answer to the American Civil Liberties Union -- the complaint claims that protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people "is an effort to eradicate religious beliefs opposing the homosexual agenda from the marketplace of ideas by demonizing, vilifying, and criminalizing such beliefs as a matter of federal law and policy."
The suit was placed on behalf of the American Family Association of Michigan president Gary Glenn, along with pastors Rene Ouellette, Levon Yuille and James Combs.
Claiming "there is no need" to extend hate crimes definitions, Thomas More chief counsel Richard Thompson attempted to minimize the impact of violent crimes against homosexuals. "Of the 1.38 million violent crimes reported in the U.S. by the FBI in 2008, only 243 were considered as motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation," he wrote on the group's Web site. "The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin."
rawstory.com/2010/02/christians-claim-hate-crimes-law-effort-eradicate-beliefs/
Of course, Thompson is full of shit, as a quick look at the Dept of Justice's website shows:
Offenders targeted 1,706 victims due to a sexual-orientation bias, and of these:
- 57.5 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-male homosexual bias.
- 27.3 percent were victims because of an anti-homosexual bias.
- 11.6 percent were victims because of an anti-female homosexual bias.
- 2.0 percent were victims because of an anti-heterosexual bias.
- 1.6 percent were victims because of an anti-bisexual bias.
Thomas E. Perez, who took over the civil right division in Oct of 2009, said in a speech on Friday to the American Constitution Society, and in comments to reporters, that he was "shocked" by what he described as the feeble record of his predecessors under President George W. Bush in bringing hate-crimes cases.
AND THEN: One of the pastors who sued is saying that anti-gay hate crimes legislation is demeaning to black people!
"I feel like individuals [are] demeaning the black community in trying to equate us to what someone chooses to do sexually," Yiulle remarks. "The totality of black people is far greater than what one would prefer to do in expressing themselves in the manner I've already stated."
So, just to review: Violence against minorities is apparently a necessary part of Christian worship that must be legally protected. O_o
X-posted to atheism