The Real Hate Criminals Are David Duke, Flip Benham, And Virginia Foxx

[x Wikipedia]

Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and subsequently murdered near Laramie, Wyoming. He was attacked on the night of October 6–7, 1998 and died at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 12, from severe head injuries. During the trial, witnesses stated that Shepard was targeted because he was gay. His murder brought national as well as international attention to the issue of hate crime legislation at the state and federal levels. Russell Arthur Henderson pleaded guilty to felony murder and kidnapping, allowing him to avoid the death penalty. Aaron James McKinney was convicted of felony murder and kidnapping. Henderson is currently serving two consecutive life sentences and McKinney is serving the same but without the possibility of parole.

Move over, Michele Bachmann (R-MN)! Make way for Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Representative Foxx (no kin to Fanne) is vying for the Biggest Dingbat in the House of Representatives. These fools, these True Republican Women run with the likes of David Duke and his ilk. Like the fools who defend waterboarding and deserve to experience that torture themselves, this crowd of bigots deserves to suffer beatings and to be left tied to a barbed wire fence in Wyoming in the late fall when the snow is blowing. If this is (fair & balanced) tough love, so be it.

Click on image to enlarge.
Copyright © 2009 John Sherffius/Boulder Daily Camera

[x Waco Fishwrap]
When I Say "Hate Crime," You Say . . .
By John Young

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absolute act aimed amendment american benham bible bill brother central characters christian constitutionally crime duke express fear flip floor forbids formed freedom god hate homosexuals illegal including intent issue jesus legal literature lynchings matthew mortal offender offenses oh pedophile people protected sexual shepard something stripped survival threat threatens truth violence

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This is not just a threat to the American way of life. It threatens the “very survival of freedom.”

So says former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.

Tell us, Brother Duke. What is it? Unauthorized eavesdropping? The abolition of habeas corpus? Martial law under the Patriot Act?

Actually, no. The threat to our very freedom is something called the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act.

The bill broadens the definition of a federal hate crime to one targeting homosexuals or transgendered people. It is named after the college student beaten and left to die, bound to a Wyoming fence post, by two men who posed as gays.

An act aimed at offenses like this, say Duke and other fringe characters like Operation Rescue’s Phillip (Flip) Benham, threatens our freedom and the First Amendment. They have mounted a march on Washington and a “gathering of Christian leaders” (ahem) to stop it. Godspeed, voyagers. Let us know if any of your First Amendment rights are stripped in the process by homeland security.

The bill in question, S.909, certainly wouldn’t do that, unless you decided to take a mighty rod to some people with gender-identity issues to instill the fear of a wrathful God in them.

Bible Made Illegal?

Oh, but the bill is much worse, says Benham. It “expressly forbids any language that might be perceived as ‘hate’ by the homosexual community. This makes illegal every word in the Bible.”

Well, I flipped though S.909. Here’s what I found:

“Nothing in this act shall... prohibit any constitutionally protected speech, expressive conduct or activities (regardless of whether compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief)....”

This bill is not about faith or free expression. It’s about violence, violence aimed at a group of people to imprint mortal fear in them, much as the cross burnings and lynchings of Brother Duke’s forebears did with Americans of color.

You may object to hate crimes as a legal concept, being a crime compounded by the mind-set of an offender. But if you say it’s a case of the state enforcing an unconstitutional “thought crime,” know that the penalties for any number of criminal offenses are made more severe based on the intent of the offender. Indeed, that’s the difference between manslaughter and murder.

Really, what’s at play here is absolute, unmitigated hate masquerading as Christian love.

It’s the kind of hatred that would cause Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC) to stand on the House floor and call the hate crime against Matthew Shepard a “hoax.” You see, she says, it was just a robbery.

It’s the kind of venom that would get a hate merchant like Duke engaged in the issue, to say that including “sexual orientation” in a hate-crimes bill would make it a hate crime to slap a pedophile.

I’d like to see a prosecutor try that legal tack. No, Brother Duke, I’m thinking this “threat to our very liberty” is all in your calcifying skull.

Oh, and by the way: Pedophiles come of all sexual persuasions, including yours.

Your anti-S.909 literature, Brother Benham, quotes Jesus (“Have I now become the enemy of the truth?”) and says, “Is truth hate?”

Does God hate homosexuals? Or were homosexuals (like you and me, as Genesis says) formed in God’s image?

My opinion: The last person for whom you people speak is Jesus Christ. The “truth” you express is hate. Constitutionally protected, I might add, but hate nonetheless. It must be. You are so stirred by it to look right past the intent of something aimed at acts of violence to find a “threat to our very freedom” in it.

Freedom to do what, Brother Duke? ♥

[John Young has been editorial page editor and columnist of the Waco Tribune-Herald since 1984. A Denver native, Young was editor of the Valley Courier, a small daily in Alamosa, CO, from 1978 to 1984. His column is carried regularly on the Cox News Service and New York Times News Service. Young’s column appears Thursday and Sunday in the Waco Tribune-Herald.]

Copyright © 2009 Waco Tribune-Herald

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves