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Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
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Hate crimes bill killed by friendly fire |
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| Hate crimes bill killed by friendly fire | ||
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by Chris Crain -
SGN Contributing Writer Karl Rove's days of working the political wedge against Gays may be over, but Gay and Transgender hate crimes protections were nonetheless caught in a classic Washington vice last week, dashing hopes the long-stalled legislation would pass this year with Democrats finally in control of Congress. Bipartisan majorities in both the House and the Senate had already passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity - along with gender and disability - to existing federal hate crime laws that already cover race and religion. But with President Bush threatening a veto, Senate Democrats attached the hate crime bill to a measure they knew the White House would be loathe to send back: money for the Department of Defense and the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, the ploy backfired when conservative Republicans in the House threatened to vote against the bill because of the hate crimes add-on, and there weren't enough Democrats left to pass it because dozens in the party's liberal wing refused to budge from voting against it as a protest vote against the war. Historic hate crime protections for Gay and Transgender Americans were killed in the crossfire, and from friendly soldiers at that. When the House whip count showed the votes weren't there, Senate Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Edward Kennedy agreed to drop the Shepard Act. More than a year after Democrats wrested control of Congress, the most basic Gay rights legislation remains hopelessly mired in Beltway gridlock. Which means it's time for that favorite Washington bloodsport: finger-pointing. And there's plenty of blame to go around - and not just for the feckless politicians on Capitol Hill. The very same GLBT groups that leapt into action last month to try and keep Transgender protections in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act were comparatively silent throughout November over the Shepard Act. Whether exhausted by the ENDA fight or too busy planning Thanksgiving holidays, the Human Rights Campaign didn't march on the Hill with staff and board members, or flood congressional offices with 80,000 phone calls and emails - as they claimed to have done for Trans inclusion in ENDA. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force didn't launch a website or collect signatories from more than 300 community organizations to keep hate crimes a part of the Defense bill, the so-called "United ENDA" alliance did, even actively opposing the Gay-only compromise when the Trans provision came up short. Instead, all HRC and the Task Force managed were a few measly letters and e-mails and presumably some behind-the-scenes lobbying, despite the fact that the Shepard Act actually includes the type of Transgender protections that everyone found so indispensable for ENDA. Still, the herd of Democrat cats on the Hill bear the brunt of responsibility. The ENDA parallels are obvious here, too. A House whip count showed the votes weren't there for Transgender protections in ENDA, so they were stripped. The same fate befell the hate crime amendment to the Defense bill, although it's unclear whether the inclusion of "gender identity" helped tank the Shepard Act. Even if the Shepard Act as a Gay-only measure would have siphoned off too many Republican votes, the Democrats don't get a bye on this one. The tactic of mixing hate crimes with Defense funding was suspect from the beginning, but it was Kennedy and Reid who did so, knowing the Iraq war already made that legislation a hot-button. Granted they did so because Bush threatened a veto, but having chosen that path the onus was on congressional Democrats to see the measure through to passage. Therein lies the rub as far as the Democrats in Washington and Gay rights are concerned. Despite years of overwhelming support in public and in Congress for hate crimes and workplace protections, the Democrats have not managed to enact either, even when they controlled one or both houses of Congress and the White House. A Gay-inclusive hate crime bill has passed the House and Senate several times before, only to die because Republicans killed it in conference. Now that the Democrats are in charge, we get the same result. The Democrats enjoy a 33-seat majority in the House and yet the party's own headcount on the hate-crime inclusive Defense bill showed it coming up 40 votes short. That means more than 70 Democrats put symbolic opposition to Iraq funding and missile defense at a higher priority than the real-world fight against bias crimes. There's nothing wrong with symbolic votes, of course, and if they can put pressure on President Bush to end his debacle in Iraq then the more the merrier - except when they also have the effect of killing historic civil rights legislation. Chris Crain is former editor of the Washington Blade and five other Gay publications and now edits GayNewsWatch.com. He can be reached via his blog at www.citizencrain.com |
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