“Thought Crimes”

Jim Burroway

April 13th, 2007

The Family “Research” Council continues to sound the drumbeat of “Thought Crimes” in their latest e-mail action alerts, and the “Thought Crime” meme is spreading among anti-gay lobbyists and activists around the country. Focus on the Family is also spreading the word:

“It’s fair to call it a Thought Crimes law,” said Caleb H. Price, social-research analyst for Focus on the Family. “Ultimately, it punishes those who hold politically incorrect thoughts and beliefs about homosexuality.” 

This is a shockingly shameless distortion of what the proposed hate crimes legislation actually says. It’s a distortion so twisted, it’s fair to call it a bold-faced lie — an expression I virtually never use. It’s not about “thoughts” or speech; it’s about violence. Are any of these “thought crimes”?

  • “Fags deserve to die” and “you’re mother is hell bound” were spray-painted on a gay man’s home in Irving College, Tennessee.  Three weeks earlier, people drove yelling anti-gay epiteths and shooting about 80 paintballs at his home, breaking a storm window.
  • Fifteen year old Anthony Hergesheimer of Pueblo, Colorado was beaten by six fellow students as he was walking home from school. He suffered a black eye, severe damage to his face and a broken nose. He underwent surgery on his nose and forehead.
  • Cecily Gonzalez, 17, and Uriah Smith, 18, were sentenced for the kidnapping and all-night beating of an Edgewood, New Mexican youth. He had been “kidnapped, tied up and beaten by three men and a woman, allegedly in an effort to make him straight.” “I couldn’t even recognize his face,” his mother said. Added his sister, “I sat in the hospital room and listened to him cry in pain for what those people did to him.”
  • Kurt Feudale and fellow Chico State student Rob Felicano were attacked in downtown Chico, California after Feundale put a friendly arm around his buddy. They’re not gay, but seven or eight other men assumed they were. They pinned the friends against a wall and beat them, proving that even straight people can be victims of anti-gay violence.

The proposed legislation will not set up “special rights” for a select few. It will protect everyone, including Feudale and Felicano. When it says regardless of sexual orientation, it really means regardless of sexual orientation. What part of regardless do they not understand?

Timothy Kincaid

April 13th, 2007

It would even protect those poor PFOX members who Regina Griggs keeps telling us are under attack for being ex-gay.

Kevin

April 14th, 2007

The only “special rights” these rightwing groups are concerned about are the ones they’ve enjoyed for years, managing to escape punishment or face lower sentences for beating and murdering American citizens who are gay. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to get an idea of where some of those slurs spray painted on the Tennessee house came from – and you can bet those are the same expressions regularly encouraged by many of these same “religious” folk.

It must be a horrible shock to the Right that gay citizens actually expect justice from their own government – after all, wasn’t it usually a “christian” judge who would delight in moralizing from the bench as he reduced sentences for anti-gay perpetrators? And yet we hear nothing from the Right about that kind of judicial activism, mainly because they believe that is exactly how the judiciary should behave – and that all men are NOT created equal.

These dominionist clowns and their traveling circus of deception might be religious, but there are all sorts of cults making that claim. . .

belledame222

April 14th, 2007

:headdesk:

i hate these disingenuous smarmballs. so much.

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