Paving the way to legalization of religious persecution

The Senate approved the latest defense spending bill. And the Democrats threw in an unrelated rider: The Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act. The MSHCA widens hate crimes to include crimes committed against people because of their sexual orientation.

I believe that no crimes should be committed against anyone. I believe that people should not hate other people, and that they should not act out of hate. But I oppose the MSHCA for four reasons:

1. The MSHCA is entirely unrelated to defense spending and should therefore be presented as a separate bill and given an up-or-down vote based on its own merits. As it stands, the Democrats just wanted to attach controversial legislation to a must-pass bill. The MSHCA failed the four previous times that it was proposed.

2. The MSHCA gives special victim status to homosexuals, making crimes targeting homosexuals (as in all hate crimes) a more grievous offense carrying a harsher penalty. If we believe in equality under the law, then we need to erase hate crimes from our laws because hate crime legislation makes some victims more important than other victims. The bill also authorizes federal funds to assist in the prosecution of hate crimes--once again creating a special class of victims who get federal assistance while other victims go unaided.

3. The MSHCA opens the door to controlling religious thought and speech. As of yet, the MSHCA only prohibits speech that would incite violence against homosexuals--but that type of speech is already prohibited. You're not allowed to incite violence against anyone. The only reason why you would need to specifically single out homosexuals here is to set a precedent for later expansion of definitions of prohibited speech.

4. The MSHCA is just one more example of the federal government overstepping its constitutionally defined limits. I can at least understand the context in which original hate crime legislation passed--when some states unabashedly miscarried justice for minorities, forcing the federal government to interfere. But when we don't have an emergency requiring federal involvement, the federal government should stay out, and we should repeal the emergency provisions that allowed the feds to overstep their bounds in the past.