Current federal Hate crime laws do not include sexual orientation in their definitions, despite the fact that quite clearly homosexuals are fairly big targets for hate crime. As the Congress moves to address this gap the President and evangelicals everywhere are working themselves into a tizzy.
Having looked at issues like these for quite some time I've noticed that whenever any measure for tolerance or acceptance of the fact that homosexuals are in our society and aren't busy eating babies or pulling the fabric of civilization down around us evangelical and fundamentalist Christians seem to take it as an affront to their religion. What we see now as a result of this sentiment is the President declaring, in essence, that the fact that irrational hatred is such an important part of his personal identity that any legislation with a spirit that contradicts that hatred must be stopped.
Religious groups seem to be echoing this sentiment - while it may, in our society, be a particularly grievous action to commit a violent crime against another purely out of hatred for his religion or his race, violence against a person simply for having different sexual attractions must not be protected in the same way, as it is so crucially important that we hate these people as a matter of course.
Who, then, is truly the enemy of civil society? The religious right sure does like to tout the idea that homosexuals will bring the end to western civilization, but coming from a group of people for whom institutionalized hatred seems to be such an important virtue, one really must wonder.
