Thought Crimes Bill Gets Through Senate

Time for federal prosecutors to sharpen their powers of extrasensory perception.  Senate OKs bill on hate crimes

…The legislation, named the Matthew Shepard Act after the gay University of Wyoming student beaten to death in 1998, would impose longer prison sentences for offenses motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

It increases federal power:

It also would make it easier for federal prosecutors to pursue hate-crime charges when local authorities do not.

If enacted, it would be the largest expansion of federal hate-crime laws since they were created in 1968 in response to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was attached as an amendment to the defense spending bill, which passed by a voice vote.  Senator McCain calls BS:

“Our legal system is based on identifying, capturing and punishing criminals, and not on using the power of government to try to divine biases,” Mr. McCain said during floor debate. “Crimes motivated by hate deserve vigorous prosecution, but so do crimes motivated by absolute wanton disregard for life of any kind.”

Religious groups also oppose the bill, saying it will infringe upon free-speech rights to preach against homosexuality.

A similar bill was passed in the House last April 249-175.

This legislation shifts the justice system’s focus from the criminal act to a prosecutor’s perception of the motive driving the act.  It will have the effect of making crimes against some people punished more severely than the same crimes against other people.  It is another step on the road to European-style multiculturalism, which selectively prosecutes and judges crimes depending on which identity group the victim is identified with.  It’s not an individual whose rights are violated, it’s an ethnicity, a religious affiliation or gender group that is injured in that legal point of view.

I thought America was about equal justice for all.  This bill will achieve the polar opposite.

A Second Bite At The Prosecution Apple

That’s what passage of the federal hate crimes bill will give the federal government, say its critics.

We wrote earlier about how backers of the federal hate-crimes bill want to use it to reprosecute people who have already been found innocent, and to prosecute people whom state prosecutors decline to charge because the evidence against them is so weak. Supporters of the bill have given only lame rationalizations for why state not-guilty verdicts should not be respected. (Some of the bill’s supporters have even made the strange claim that the defendants in the Duke Lacrosse case, whom the North Carolina attorney general later admitted were actually innocent, should have been reprosecuted in federal court).

Such reprosecutions fall within a loophole in Constitutional protections against double jeopardy known as the “dual sovereignty” doctrine. But ironically, they violate Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — a treaty that many of the bill’s backers harp on to push liberal causes, such as restrictions on the death penalty and antiterrorism measures. Article 14’s ban on double jeopardy has no “dual sovereignty” loophole, unlike the U.S. Constitution. That is an additional reason to be skeptical of the hate-crimes bill, which is known as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (LLEHCPA, H.R. 1913).

The bill, which was passed by the House Judiciary Committee, vastly expands federal hate crime law.  It adds “gender, sexual orientation, and transgender characteristics to a law originally designed to protect racial minorities. It also greatly expands the law’s reach over local offenses typically handled by state prosecutors, by eliminating many jurisdictional limits.”

So un-American, but so multicultural.  It’s a kick in the head to the concept of equal justice for the individual under the law, and a big boost for the concept of protected groups whose rights trump those of any given individual.  How does a certain document go?  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Its says nothing about some people’s rights being more inalienable than others just because of physical characteristics or ethnicity or political clout.

Time to start withdrawing our consent to this federal power grab.  The state sovereignty movement and the tea party movement are good starts.

Kids Books Are Nuance-Free Zones

Children don’t do nuance.  Their brains aren’t developed enough.  If you want to communicate with a kid, black and white works best.  Eco-freaks increasingly count on that fact to push their political agendas and philosophical ideas through children’s books, says the children’s book reviewer for the WSJ.  Scary Green Monsters

The patriarch of the vogue for green-themed children’s books is surely Carl Hiaasen, the novelist and Miami Herald columnist who shot to eco-stardom in 2002 with “Hoot,” a novel for middle-schoolers about three children who foil a corporation’s attempt to build a pancake restaurant over a burrow of endangered miniature owls. “Hoot” won a Newbery Honor Award, and was followed in 2005 by “Flush,” a tale recounting the adventures of a different group of youthful oddball allies that is seeking to expose a casino-boat operator who’s been flushing raw sewage into harbor water.

Mr. Hiaasen’s latest, “Scat,” which came out in January, ever so slightly betrays the strains of extending the franchise. Here the story features a new group of three children who band together with an eccentric biology teacher and an armed eco-terrorist to stop a buffoonish Texas oilman from illegally extracting petroleum from the habitat of the endangered Florida panther.

In all Mr. Hiaasen’s books for children, young readers are asked to sympathize with environmentalists who thwart businessmen, even when the good guys take destructive measures such as sinking boats or torching billboards. And the eco-tropes that have worked so well for Mr. Hiaasen — Good nature! Bad capitalist! — are steadily creeping into books across the age range.

I have always been a voracious reader and have encouraged my own kids and grandsons to read, so I don’t think keeping kids from these kinds of stories is a good idea.  The key here is to be aware of what ideas your child is being exposed to and counter them with your own.  Earlier in the article the author remarks on the pervasiveness of the eco-message:

Contemporary children are so drenched with eco-propaganda that it’s almost a waste of resources. Like acid rain, but more persistent and corrosive, it dribbles down on them all day long. They get it at school, where recycling now competes with tolerance as man’s highest virtue. They get it in peppy “go green” messages online, on television and in magazines.

And from Nickelodeon.

Regardless of all that, children take their cues from their parents, at least before puberty strikes.  Your child depends on you to provide security, including the comfort of consistency.  Make sure your philosophical house is in order and monitor what your kids read.  Apply your values to the stories and make sure you’re consistent in the message.  For example, if you think it’s wrong to condone violence to gain a political end you should say so, and make it clear by repeatedly saying so every time you see that happening, not just in storybooks but in movies and TV shows.  Kids absorb values and attitudes, even if it looks like they’re not paying attention.  Parents have the most power to influence their children, and they should use it.  It’s their job.

Thanks to Center For Consumer Freedom