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Saturday, December 04, 2010

O'Leary: SPLC Aims Hate Crimes Law At First Amendment Freedoms

If you are a Christian who believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has a Christmas message for you:  Keep your religious beliefs to yourself, or risk criminal prosecution.

What else are we to make of the SPLC’s recent labeling of 18 Christian groups as “hate groups,” including the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Liberty Counsel, the National Organization for Marriage and the Traditional Values Coalition.

Their crime?  These groups represent millions of Americans and speak for tens of millions more who support traditional marriage and believe that homosexuality is biblically wrong.

I don’t use the word “crime” lightly.  Calling an organization a “hate group” used to be nothing more than a slur.  But in today’s America, such a pejorative may have serious legal connotations.

SPLC knows this, because in 2009 the group was instrumental in getting the Democrat-led Congress to pass, and President Obama to sign, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law.

The measure was passed as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. In other words, a vote against the hate crimes bill would have been a vote against funding our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such is the underhanded way Congress conducts business.

As I detail in my recently released book, America’s War on Christianity, this new law adds homosexuals and transsexuals to the list of uber-protected citizens under existing federal hate crimes law.

The measure effectively criminalizes any speech that may be “proven” to incite hatred that leads to violence against any of the special classes of citizens (homosexuals, transsexuals, etc.) who are protected under the law.

Many refer to the law as the “The Pedophile Protection Act” because, in the process of extending special federal protection to individuals on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, the majority in the U.S. House refused to exclude any of the 547 forms of sexual deviancy or “paraphilias” listed by the American Psychiatric Association, including pedophilia.

Nor would the majority agree to extend those same “enhanced penalty” protections to military veterans attacked because of their service, as happened in Little Rock, Arkansas, when a Muslim convert shot and killed a 24-year-old Army recruiter in June 2009, reportedly for ideological reasons.

Democratic champions of the bill claim a special provision in the law specifically protects “a person’s exercise of religion, speech, expression, or association” as proof the bill doesn’t eviscerate the First Amendment. However, this is intentionally misleading.                                 


Read more at the Washington Examiner

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ridiculous. I am one who disagrees with homosexuality b/c of my religious beliefs, but I also do not believe it is my right to tell others how to live. It is my personal value. Additionally, this country was founded by Christians, and now that very government is trying to call it a hate crime? Disgusting.

Anonymous said...

Makes me glad I don't have any children and that I'm pretty old and won't be here much longer. It simply disgusts me what "we" have become with all our tolerances.