Obama and Hate Crime Legislation

One thing is certain. A "President Obama" would press for a robust law against crimes he thinks are worthy of extra punishment. The Matthew Shepard Bill failed last year; undoubtedly a fully Democrat U.S. Government would pass it in its most punitive form.

Matthew Shepard was killed in a botched robbery. Because he was a homosexual the crime became famous and became the poster-crime for hate legislation. The perpetrators claim not to have known the sexual orientation of their victim.

Nearly simultaneously a similar crime was committed in Arkansas when two homosexuals raped and beat a straight boy, 13-year-old seventh grader Jesse Dirkhising, to death. This crime received almost no attention from the big media. According to Accuracy In Media's Reed Irvine,

"The front-page story in the Times by Joyce Howard Price brought the story, which had been on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on three days, out of Arkansas. But a Nexis search at the end of November found only a half dozen news stories about it outside of Arkansas and a dozen editorials, opinion columns and letters.

The contrast between the coverage of homosexuals murdering a seventh-grader in Arkansas and straights murdering Matthew Shepard, a homosexual college student in Wyoming, was striking. The Washington Post printed over 80 stories about the Shepard case since the murder last year. It has run one 59-word story about the Dirkhising murder, on Saturday, October 30, and that didn't even appear in the edition that is widely distributed in the greater Washington, D.C. area.

That was eight days after The Washington Times put the story on page one, five days after Les Kinsolving, a Baltimore radio talk show host, had asked White House spokesman Joe Lockhart if President Clinton would comment on the Dirkhising murder as he had on the Shepard case, and a day after the AP finally put the story on the national wire. The Washington Post's ombudsman explained her paper's failure to cover the story, saying, in effect, that it doesn?t report murders outside the Washington area unless, like the Shepard murder, the editors think they teach a lesson or are exceptionally newsworthy.

Jonathan Gregg, a senior editor at Time, gave this explanation in a column in Time Daily on line: "The reason the Dirkhising story received so little play is because it offered no lessons. Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons. Jesse Dirkhising's death gives us nothing except the depravity of two sick men. There is no lesson here, no moral of tolerance, no hope to be gleaned in the punishment of the perpetrators. To be somehow equated with these monsters would be a bitter legacy indeed for Matthew Shepard."

It is abundantly clear that "hate crimes" don't reflect the crime, they reflect the protected status of the victim. Dirkhising wasn't a protected victim; his homosexual lover "monsters" were the protected individuals, not him.

As for religion, that hate crime source is being fought in the U.N. and our Supreme Court Judges seem to think it appropriate to use such external rulings in determining the internal law for the U.S. Obama makes no reference to protecting religion in his comments.

But Canada has simultaneously protected religion and attacked it. In a decision on 8-12-97, an appellate court upheld the ruling against four bible passages that offended homosexuals: The bumper sticker in the advertisement displayed references to four Bible passages: Romans 1, Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. when these passage numbers were printed on bumper stickers, it became a hate crime. Freedom of religious speech succumbed to homosexual indignation. Religion will undoubtedly be driven into the darkened corners of the private basement, while homosexuals romp in nude perversion on city streets as they gleefully have in San Fransisco and San Diego.

A "President Obama" will bring this to fruition. It is the rational end of secularization, the process of eliminating all morality from the public venue. The singular, allowable, tolerated culture will be amorality: the tolerance of everything except morals, the triumph of indignation over reason, the totalitarianism of enforced public paganism. Such cultures are weak; a lack of character produces no will to fight. Perhaps the muslims will conquer after all...