[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 145 (Tuesday, October 13, 1998)]
[House]
[Page H10815]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  CONGRESS SHOULD ALLOW EDUCATORS TO DEAL WITH PREJUDICE AND BROADEN 
        DEFINITION OF HATE CRIMES TO INCLUDE SEXUAL ORIENTATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, earlier this week, a very 
decent young man was brutally murdered by two savages. And I am 
particularly struck, Mr. Speaker, because given the reasons that those 
two deformed individuals, mentally and morally deformed, murdered that 
individual, it could have been me. Had I, alone and unarmed, confronted 
these two thugs, I could have been subjected to the same brutalization 
that Mr. Shepard was in Wyoming, because his crime was to be a gay man.
  Something in the culture in which these two young men who murdered 
him grew up led them, without an ounce of humanity, without a scrap of 
decency, to set upon this young man with a weapon, beat him to death, 
and leave him not quite dead, but at the point of death, alone, and in 
a way, that added further to his torment.
  Mr. Speaker, I am encouraged by the number of people who have spoken 
out against this savagery. I am optimistic, having spoken with leaders 
here on both sides in the House, that we will take an important step 
and add to the Federal hate crimes legislation a provision that would 
say that if a young man who happens to be gay, as I happen to be gay, 
were to be set upon by thugs in the future who are so consumed with 
prejudice as to lose any shred of their humanity and kill him, that in 
appropriate circumstances, if the Attorney General found that certain 
very stringent requirements were met, and if a Federal presence was 
necessary, the Federal presence could be there. So, I hope we will add 
this to the legislation.
  But we need to go beyond that. I do not argue, Mr. Speaker, that 
those who have been critical of various proposals that gay and lesbian 
people have put forward are guilty of murder or even of creating the 
climate. But this savage murder does call us to the need to improve 
what we as a society do to protect other young Mr. Shepherds from this 
kind of brutality in the future.
  In particular, we have debated on the floor of this House measures 
whereby Members of this House have sought to penalize schools, 
secondary schools, because they would set up programs to do two things. 
First of all, to offer protection to the 15- and 16-year-old Shepherds, 
to the young gay men and young lesbians who find themselves tormented 
and abused and sometimes physically assaulted in school.
  Some of these schools would also try to teach young people in their 
teens that brutalizing people because they do not like their sexual 
orientation is not acceptable human behavior. And we have had people in 
this House try to stop that, try to penalize it.
  I hope that one of the things that will come out of this terrible, 
terrible murder will be a cessation of those trying to prevent schools 
from trying in turn to prevent this. It is not random that the terrible 
murder was committed and it is shocking that a 21-year-old and a 22-
year-old, that they could be so bestial in their attitude towards a 
follow human being. These are people not long out of high school 
themselves.
  Mr. Speaker, this underlies the importance of allowing educators to 
deal with prejudice. We talk about teaching values. But when some talk 
about teaching the value of tolerance, when some talk about condemning 
violence based on someone's basic characteristics, we are told we 
cannot do that. We have been told that we cannot let a school teach 
acceptance of the gay lifestyle.
  Mr. Speaker, think about that. What does nonacceptance mean? If 
acceptance is interpreted to mean approval, I and others do not care. 
There are bigots in this world whose approval holds no charms for me. 
But when nonacceptance means not accepting someone's right to live, we 
have a serious problem.
  If the two murderers who so brutally beat Mr. Shepard to death and 
left him in this situation to ultimately to die, if they had been in a 
school system where people had taught that gay men and lesbians were 
human beings with a right to live, maybe this would not have happened. 
Maybe teaching people to accept differences, not in the sense of 
becoming their advocates or becoming their supporters, but in 
refraining from this sort of assault would be a good thing.
  And so we will return to this. I hope we will, in the piece of 
legislation that is about to wrap up, adopt the hate crimes statute. 
But I hope also, Mr. Speaker, and I appreciate the Chair's indulgence 
for 10 seconds, I hope we will no longer see in this House efforts to 
harass educators and penalize educators who understand the importance 
of trying to remove from young people's attitudes the kind of 
hatefulness that led to this murder.

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