[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 60 (Thursday, April 23, 2009)]
[House]
[Page H4722]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       NOBODY FAVORS HATE CRIMES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gohmert) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOHMERT. Madam Speaker, yesterday and today in the full Judiciary 
Committee we have been taking up a bill called, by most people, the 
hate crimes act. It sounds like something that everybody would be for. 
You know, who favors hate? Nobody. Perhaps the only kind of hate we 
should be in favor of is the hatred with which we hate hate. But that's 
not what it's about. It is about creating new law, new crimes that are 
duplicates of what's in every State in the Union.
  Now, there are 45 States that already have hate crimes bills, but 
even there, most are unnecessary. The case that you often hear that is 
a reason we need hate crimes is the James Byrd case, where this poor 
gentleman, African-American, was dragged to death.
  Now, I would be in favor of allowing the victim's family to pick the 
terrain and the manner of dragging the defendants once they are 
convicted, but that's not allowed. The death penalty amendment was even 
voted down.
  So there's no enhancements, nothing that would affect the poster 
cases that are constantly raised as a reason to have the hate crime 
laws. And, in fact, when we hear over and over there's these epidemics 
of hate crimes that we have to stop, actually, there were nearly a 
million assaults in America in 2007; 242 assaults included some kind of 
bodily injury in which there was some motive attributed to bias or 
hatred because of a selected group, 242.
  Again, there was a killing of a poor young man named Nicholas West, 
killed because he was a homosexual. His perpetrators were not charged 
under a hate crimes law, they were charged under a capital murder law 
for kidnapping. And they have already got the death penalty, just like 
the worst two perpetrators in James Byrd's situation. So what is this 
about? Well, perhaps it's about trying to create a special class of 
protected people who maybe shouldn't have protection.
  One of the last amendments we made today was going to--at least in 
this definition the term ``sexual orientation'' is included. We kept 
trying to confine it to things that were not just an aberration, and 
even the amendment to at least exclude pedophiles from the protected 
class was voted down on a strict party line.
  Every Democrat there voted to protect pedophiles and every Republican 
voted to exclude them, at least, from the definition of sexual 
orientation. We were told, well, there is a definition in one of the 
other laws about sexual orientation, and it confined it to 
heterosexuality and homosexuality.
  It's not in this law. It's not there. There is no reference to 
another law. So as a former appellate judge I would be left in 
reviewing the law to say well, what is the plain meaning? You can 
consider other definitions.
  Well, some judge will do the right thing that a judge is supposed to 
do and say, hmm, sexual orientation, it means what it says. It's 
however you are oriented sexually. If that's towards child--and the 
diagnostics statistics manual has about 30 different types of sexual 
orientation. So that includes voyeurism, it includes the pedophilia, it 
includes things like exhibitionism. It includes necrophilia for corpses 
and all these horrible things.
  But even under this law, since exhibitionists are not excluded--and I 
have had women tell me they have had people flash themselves, men flash 
themselves, and they immediately reacted and hit them with a purse.
  Under that scenario, under this law, the exhibitionist committed a 
misdemeanor and the woman that hit him with her purse committed a new 
Federal felony under the hate crimes law.
  That is absurd. We don't need this law. There is no reason for it. We 
even tried to include in here specifically the kinds of churches that 
were invaded and attacked for supporting the California marriage 
amendment, and that was voted down on a straight party line. There 
should be no special classes.
  And the other thing here that would silence Christian ministers and 
eventually rabbis or imams from quoting the Bible, the Tanach or Koran 
where it condemns homosexuality, because under this bill if a minister, 
a rabbi, imam quotes from those scriptures and says homosexuality is an 
aberration--or whatever language they use, that it is wrong, it hurts 
society--and some nut hears them and goes out, commits a crime of 
violence, then under 18 U.S.C. (2)(a) they could be arrested, charged 
as a principal.
  This was a bad bill, and it was a bad day for the law.

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