Brody's Scribbles... The view from Britain, A Guest Editorial from Tim Trent

US passes hate crimes law

By Tim Trent (Bracknell, UK) Oct 29 | This is a significant and substantial event.The whys and wherefores are for a US person or a directly affected person to comment upon. Yet I feel this was and is a significant event.  I'm heartened by the fact that this could never have happened under Shrub, [former president G.W.Bush] controlled as he was by his own blinkered pseudo-christianity and by the nutters of the religious right.

Odd, is it not, with all the bluster from the US religious right how Obama talks about all segments of society being protected, and includes words about prayer, too. This is not, though I've flagged it as such, an LGBT issue.  This issue includes, but is not limited to:

• Race
• Sexual orientation
• Creed

It includes so much. But the bigots objected because the bill included the words Matthew Shepard in the title, and they ignored the execution by being dragged behind a truck of James Byrd Jr who died because he happened to be black.

What I find astounding is the string of comments against this bill on Youtube. If you click the video to open in there you will see them. It makes you wonder how folk like that manage to understand society.

I'm very unsure about hate crimes legislation. I'm not opposed to it when it is necessary, but I also wonder why the laws on the statute books already are deemed insufficient protection for the community.

It is a truism that murder is murder, assault is assault. I don't understand why those laws are insufficient, and why more law is passed (I was going to say "at the drop of a hat", but this took over a decade) instead of the police and judiciary being instructed to prosecute and sentence correctly.

I wonder whether the tougher law, the hate crime law, will be used as a first step in a plea bargain, and that the "lesser" crime of murder will be accepted as a guilty plea, and I wonder what that might mean in sentencing terms.

And I wonder why the US religious right has done so much powerful lobbying and marketing against this bill, which seems to me to promote simply human rights. Or is their brand of christianity only for white folks?