“There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue … if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice…” –John Adams (1775)

My last column, “The ‘Gay Agenda’ v. Liberty,” outlined recent examples of how the Left’s assault on marriage and family is a façade for their frontal assault on the First Amendment and, by extension, two of the most critical pillars of Liberty. The Democrat Party has cleverly seized upon the sympathies of tens of millions of mostly young and female voters, enticing them to become unwitting pawns who “feel good” about “gay rights.” But the Leftist ideologues who now oversee the once-proud Democrat Party understand that the overarching strategy is to constrict Liberty and empower their statist politicos and bureaucrats.

As a follow up, this column focuses on how the Left canonizes “victims” of so-called “hate crimes” in order to expand voter constituencies. They do so by politicizing assaults against members of minority groups, which typically support Democrats – qualifying those crimes as being of a more hateful class of offenses than the same crimes against others who are not a member of that constituency. The co-opting of these identity voter blocs follows the Left’s tried-and-true politics of disparity paradigm.

For background, “hate crimes” today are the evolutionary political product of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which expanded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to outlaw any effort to “injure, intimidate or interfere with anyone [engaged in protected activities], by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.” The original proscription of such discrimination sounds reasonable – but in the 50 years since passage of the 1964 Act, that reason has twisted to comport with Leftist political agendas.

For example, among the key protected activities in the ‘68 legislation are seeking entrance to educational institutions and equal employment opportunities, which, by way of legislated and court-ordered affirmative action criteria, created an epidemic of reverse discrimination – which polarized the American people and further firmed up those already loyal Democrat constituencies.

But the current political “hate crime” classification is a far more insidious defilement of the Civil Rights Act than affirmative action.

Comment

I should state for the record that I believe ALL violent crimes are hate crimes, and no assault on a fellow citizen is more demanding of justice than another similar assault, regardless of the race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation of the victim. The notion that one murder is more deserving of justice than another is itself an assault on the principles of the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal justice under the law.

The Left’s hate crimes hoax agenda is advanced by race hustlers, those awful opportunists who never let the truth get in the way of their political agenda. That was aptly demonstrated in the national crusade to elevate to “hate crime” status the self-defense shooting of a Florida hoodlum, Trayvon Martin, by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman. That crusade was a political maneuver that dovetailed conveniently with Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Now, if race hustlers were really interested in the Truth versus manufactured hate crimes hoaxes, they would have been too busy focusing on Obama’s hometown of Chicago, which, between the date of Trayvon Martin’s death and verdict in Zimmerman’s trial, recorded more than 700 murders of black residents, almost all of whom were killed by other black or “black Hispanic” gangbangers. But Obama and his racist cadres never mentioned a single one of those deaths, or thousands of such others across the nation, because those murders did not fit their political agenda. And now that the 2012 campaign has concluded, the race hustlers have stopped insisting that Martin’s death be treated as a hate crime.

Fact is, the per-capita black-on-white assaults and murders nationwide grossly outnumbers that of white-on-black assaults and murders, but there has never been a national campaign to classify one of the former as a race-based “hate crime” – not even in horrendous cases such as the torture/rape/murders of a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom by five black thugs.

Unquestionably, in the majority of black-on-white crimes, race is a key factor, but you won’t hear that from a Democrat.

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has clearly asserted that any “hate crime” laws signed by Obama, would not apply to white victims, but only protect those who have been subjected to “the unfortunate history of our nation.” According to Holder, “What we’re looking for here in terms of the expansion of the statute are instances where there is a historic basis to see groups of people who are singled out for violence perpetrated against them because of who they are … African-American, Hispanic, people who are Jewish, people who are gay…”

And speaking of victims, the latest Obama/Holder legislative push is to strike state laws prohibiting convicted felons from voting. Holder claims, “In many states, felony disenfranchisement laws are still on the books. And the current scope of these policies is not only too significant to ignore – it is also too unjust to tolerate. These laws deserve to be not only reconsidered, but repealed.”

Of course, these laws affect far more Democrat constituents voters than Republican.

While elevating rare white-on-black assaults to political “hate crime” status is an erroneous adulteration of the law, more fallacious is the awarding of that classification to rare assaults ostensibly based on sexual orientation.

Indeed, there is no more infamous example of the truth being trumped by the Left’s “hate crime” constituency development agenda than the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. As you may recall, Shepard was savagely beaten, tortured and left for dead by two other young men, who claimed the “gay panic” defense, suggesting that Shepard had approached them for sex and they responded by murdering him.

Upon his death, the Left canonized Shepard as the poster boy for violence against homosexuals, a fitting cause célèbre to advance “hate crime” legislation. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) proclaimed, “Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement.”

There were two plays, three films and a documentary about Shepard. Pop musicians including Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and Lady Gaga wrote songs about him. There was a “passion play” called “The Laramie Project,” portraying Shepard as a martyr, which played in theaters and schools across the nation. It was “one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The Matthew Shepard Foundation became the hub for his legacy.

Ted Kennedy led the charge to pass the “Matthew Shepard Act,” amending the Civil Rights “hate crime” legislation to include “sexual orientation.” Obama ceremonially signed that legislation into law in 2009 after passage by Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.

But now there is a problem: Truth is trumping the myth.

After years of exhaustive research on Shepard’s murder, including interviews with more than 100 people – associates of Shepard, his murderers and their associates – a respected journalist, Stephen Jimenez, has published his findings in “The Book of Matt.” The book dispels the notion that the murder was related to Shepard’s sexual orientation, and instead concludes he was a meth dealer and sex partner with one of his murderers – both of whom were homosexuals.

Jimenez is also a homosexual.

Even the most prominent homosexual advocacy publication in the nation, The Advocate, in an article entitled “Have We Got Matthew Shepard All Wrong?,” concludes that the new evidence significantly changes the popular narrative.

Its author, Aaron Hicklin, the homosexual editor of Out Magazine, asks, “What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?” He asks further, “Did our need to make a symbol of Shepard blind us to a messy, complex story that is darker and more troubling than the established narrative?”

Aaron concludes that Shepard’s murder was “a kind of hate crime – just not as straightforward as the one we’ve embraced all these years.”

Indeed, as I noted above, all murders are hate crimes.

Comment

I should also note here that, as is the case with “media blackouts” of black-on-white racially motivated assaults and murders, while the Leftmedia was saturating headlines and airwaves with news of the trial of Shepard’s murderers in 1999, there was virtually no mention of the kidnapping/torture/rape/murder of a 13-year-old Arkansas child, Jesse Dirkhising, by two homosexual predators.

When asked about the disparity in coverage, NBC spokesperson Barbara Levinson said, “We did not cover [the Dirkhising case]. There are many crime stories that don’t make it on the air.” Likewise, there was no mention of the Dirkhising murder by ABC, CBS, CNN, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, or USA Today. And there was no coverage of the trial of Dirkhising’s murderers.

So the Shepard case joins the “2013 Top Ten Hate Crime Hoaxes,” and the growing heap of hate hoaxers, including Sharmeka Moffitt, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Mangum, Morton Downey, Cornelius Weaver, Alicia Hardin, Madonna Constantine, Dayna Morales, Langston Carraway, Kerri Dunn, ad infinitum.

Will the truth about Shepard change anything?

Maybe for a handful of folks who are tired of being duped by Leftists. But for Obama and his cadres, their statist agenda will always trump the facts, and most of their low-info constituents are too ignorant to discern the difference.

So, where will we see the next expansion of “hate crime” interpretation in the courts and legislatures? Under Obama, the FBI’s most recent Uniform Crime Report now defines “hate crime” as not just an act against an individual, but “a business, an institution, or society as a whole.” Can you see where this is going?

The movement to define and convict “hate speech” as a reflection of “hate thought” is well underway. That interpretation will manifest itself in further constricting the First Amendment – particularly freedom of religion, speech and the press – and thus, Liberty.

The tactical “hate crime” agenda is about growing voter constituencies, but its strategic agenda is to play a key part of the Left’s endeavor to undermine Constitutional Rule of Law, and redefine it with the so-called “living constitution.” If they ultimately succeed in suppressing religious Liberty through constraints on “hate speech,” then they will succeed in diminishing the most foundational understanding that Liberty is “endowed by our Creator, and they will then further advance the despotic notion that men are the arbiters of Liberty.

And the last word on the "gay agenda” – what most disgusts me about their agenda is, there are so many challenges and changes that need to be made across our nation in order to help people help themselves, and help those who can’t. All the political, celebrity and media focus on the homosexual agenda, is NOT on my top ten list of what should dominate political discourse.

(Recommended Reading: Gender Identity, The Homosexual Agenda and The Christian Response)

Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Fortis Vigilate Paratus et Fidelis