(CNSNews.com) – GOP congressmen accuse House Democrats of “using” the military and an otherwise bipartisan defense-funding bill as a means to ram through a key piece of legislation on the homosexual activist agenda – expanding the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation.
The House voted of 281 to 146 Thursday afternoon to make it a federal hate crime to attack homosexuals and others because of sexual orientation. The legislation also creates a brand new category of hate crime: attacking U.S. military personnel because they serve in the military.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the move amounted to creating a “thought crimes” statute.
“Democrats have done a great disservice to the brave men and women of our Armed Forces today by using them as leverage to pass radical social policy,” Boehner said.
“They engineered this abuse of the legislative process because they had no way other to pass legislation that is unconstitutional and just plain wrong,” he said.
He added: “Our troops – and their families – deserve better,”
Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), the chaiman of the Republican Study Committee, called the inclusion of the measure in a bill intended to fund the military “an absolute disgrace.”
“The Democrat majority should be ashamed at the way it has used the needs of our men and women in uniform as a platform for a partisan agenda,” Price said.
It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who had reportedly insisted that the hate crimes measure be part of the conference report for the $680 billion FY 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2647).
On Wednesday evening, a GOP effort to strip the hate crimes measure from the defense bill died on a 234-178 vote. On Thursday, Pelosi was sanguine in victory.
“With today’s vote, the House has beckoned the ‘better angels of our nature’ as Americans,” the speaker said at a news conference Thursday. “No American should ever have to suffer persecution or violence because of who they are, how they look, or what they believe.”
The bill defines a hate crime to be any felony crime of violence that is “motivated by prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim, or is a violation of the State, local, or tribal hate crime laws.”
Boehner and the Republicans say the law criminalizes thinking someone may or may not have had during the commission of a crime. Punishment will now be based on a person’s thoughts – not their actual behavior.
“All violent crimes should be prosecuted vigorously, no matter what the circumstance,” Boehner said. “The Democrats’ ‘thought crimes’ legislation, however, places a higher value on some lives than others. Republicans believe that all lives are created equal, and should be defended with equal vigilance.”
Pelosi, meanwhile, invoked the name of Matthew Shepard – the University of Wyoming student who was tied to a fence post outside Laramie, Wyo., and beaten to death in 1998, allegedly because he was a homosexual. Shepard's death had prompted calls for adding sexual orientation to the hate crimes statute.
Ironically, the two men convicted of Sheaprd's murder – Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney – each received two consecutive life terms in prison, without resort to any hate-crimes enhancement.
Senate passage of the conference report is a foregone conclusion. Senators had attached the hate crimes measure to the defense authorization bill back in July. Now the Senate must approve the conference report, which could happen early next week.
President Obama has pledged to sign the bill when it reaches his desk.