President Bush was the road block against the advancement of "hate crimes" legislation, so as Bush leaves office, Congress is now poised to end religious liberty and freedom of speech.
UPDATE 4/29/09: New "Hate Crimes" bill HR 1913
On January 7, 2009, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee [TX-18] introduced two new "hate crimes" bills: H.R. 256 and H.R. 262 (click on the bill number for detailed information).
How will "hate crimes" legislation spell the end of Christian witness? Follow the links (highlighted text) in the below summary.
So-called hate-crimes laws could be the textbook case of a slippery slope: Today, it’s special protections for homosexuals. Tomorrow it’s protections for radical Islamists. And after that, who knows? Rotarians? Sex workers? Abortionists?
The problem comes in the interpretation of “hate.” As regards the volatile issues of homosexuality and transgenderism, one person’s definition of love is defined by another as hate.
In Oakland, California, a handful of African-American Christian women found out that their free speech rights had effectively been outlawed. Their Christian witness was interpreted as "hate."
"Hate crimes" bills inevitably create the "thought police" by giving the federal government jurisdiction over local criminal offenses believed to be “motivated by prejudice.”
In Alberta, Canada, a former pastor and head of a Christian organization Stephen Boissoin, sent a letter to a local paper on the issue of sexual orientation. Two weeks later a gay teen was beaten up, and after years of litigation, the pastor was found guilty of violating a "hate crimes" human rights law because the letter likely exposed gays to hatred and contempt - despite the fact that he had never advocated violence of any sort in his letter or otherwise.
A judge in New York has ruled evidence of "hatred" is unnecessary for a prosecutor to pursue a "hate crimes" case against three men arrested for the death of a homosexual man. . . . concluding prosecutors only need to show that the man, who was beaten and then hit by a vehicle in a robbery attempt, was picked because of his sexual orientation.
And while artists receive government funding for acclaimed exhibits of Jesus being defiled in urine, and by many other means . . . a 23-year-old man was arrested on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions.
