Christian activists united
in fighting hate crimes bill
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, The Layman, June 29, 2009
Christian activists on the political right are united in their opposition to a hate crimes bill making its way through Congress. But they differ in their reasons for fighting to stop it.
One camp believes the bill, which passed the House in April and is pending in the Senate, could lead to prosecution for someone who publicly denounces homosexuality as a sin. Although the Senate version would prohibit “prosecution based solely upon an individual’s expression of racial, religious, political, or other beliefs.”
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“It’s fake religious protection,” says Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian lobbying group in Washington, D.C. “It’s good for nothing [because] we are very concerned with what rogue judges and rogue prosecutors will do” with an expanded hate crimes law.
Prosecuted for conspiracy
“The pastor could be prosecuted for conspiracy to commit a hate crime,” Lafferty says, if a violent criminal were to trace his motives to a sermon or youth group meeting that involved denunciation of homosexuality.
U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), a former district judge, has also denounced the hate crimes bill as one that “would expose religious leaders to prosecution for the actions of others.” And Focus on the Family has warned that a criminal who blames a pastor for having inspired his or her act of violence against a gay person “puts the pastor in the crosshairs of this ‘hate crimes’ bill.”
Other conservative Christian opponents of the bill, however, reject the notion that religious speech could be grounds for prosecution. Pastors who merely preach against homosexuality couldn’t be prosecuted under this bill because it stiffens consequences only for doers of violent crimes, according to Barrett Duke, vice president for public policy at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“You could not use this bill to prosecute someone for preaching a sermon or standing on the corner or talking to friends about their convictions about homosexuality,” Duke said.
Duke is lobbying against the bill on other grounds. In his view, the proposed legislation would push certain suspects into a separate category – one subject to tougher investigations and harsher punishments – solely because they harbor a particular set of religious beliefs. Hence even though the proposed statute would affect only violent criminals, he says, it’s nonetheless a threat to religious freedom.
“The language of the bill creates a situation where people with genuine religious convictions – conscience convictions – about homosexuality are potentially subject to greater federal scrutiny of their actions than other people,” Duke said.
Penalized for beliefs
Others are building their case on yet another set of concerns. Kevin Theriot, senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, opposes the bill for allegedly trying to “penalize people for what they believe.” But his worry, unlike the others’ is that religious speech itself could be interpreted as an act that does direct harm and warrants prosecution – even if it doesn’t motivate someone else to use physical force in an unlawful manner.
If the bill becomes law, then “someone could claim that what a pastor or street preacher said to them caused them to lose sleep,” Theriot said, “or caused them to be so nervous that they had physical manifestation of psychological harm. And therefore what he said to them is a crime. That’s our concern.”
Worries about this bill’s effect on religious speech are without merit, according to Douglas Laycock, a religious freedom expert at the University of Michigan Law School. He cites a 1969 US Supreme Court decision, Brandenburg v. Ohio. In an e-mail, he paraphrases the case’s guiding principle: “a speaker must intend to incite imminent violence and be likely to actually succeed before he is criminally responsible.”
“I have been lobbying northeastern legislatures for religious liberty exemptions to same-sex marriage laws,” Laycock writes. “I am sympathetic to the religious liberty interests. But these [forecasts of prosecuted pastors] are crazy scenarios being spun to kill a bill they don’t like, not real concerns about religious liberty.”
Protection from acts of intolerance
This year’s hate crimes legislation passed the House on a 249-175 vote that split largely along party lines. President Obama supports the bill, which is named in the Senate for gay murder victim Matthew Shepherd, as an important measure “to protect all of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance.”
If passed, the measure would expand a four-decades-old law that targets criminals motivated by hatred based on race, color, religion or national origin. The bill would include crimes motivated by the “actual or perceived” gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of a particular victim or victims. It would also bring federal law enforcement powers to bear on local crime investigations when authorities suspect a hate motive.
Religious activists who oppose the bill worry that it could serve to muffle certain types of speech – even if it doesn’t lead to prosecution of religious leaders for the things they say.
“This is all about silencing the church,” Lafferty says. “It could have a chilling effect” if, for example, pastors counseled staffers to err on the safe side and say nothing about homosexuality.