…a world where hate was held accountable for the damage it does.

So the Matthew Shepard Act passed the House last week.  Here’s a taste of what the right wing has to say about why hate crime laws are necessary …

…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.

Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.

Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient.  One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.

It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse.  Yes, killing someone is already illegal.  But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted.  It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime.  You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it.  Was the killing accidental?  Was it accidental but reckless?  Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way?  Was it intentional?  Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law.  When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.

That’s not what they mean of course.  What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not.  Murder is murder is murder, they say.  But it isn’t.  Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it?  And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.

Steve Schalchlin over at "Living In The Bonus Round" posts about bringing the piano John Lennon composed "Imagine" on, to the home of a mother who lost her gay son to hate. 

Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.

Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.

The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…

Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.

An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings.  Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…

Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.

It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.

He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.

And then it all came apart…

On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.

The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.

When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.

While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.

It did its work…

We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.

After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.

And the attackers?  Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…

The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.

Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism.  That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them.  But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way.  Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…  In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human.  We don’t feel pain like real humans do.  We are sick, depraved, lower then animals.  Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans.  If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person.  More like kicking a dog.  These are homosexuals after all. 

But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults.  For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self.  And that is the intent.  And they are a kind of domestic terrorism.  It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate.  A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual.  Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet.  They don’t agitate for equal rights.  They don’t live openly.  They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public.  They are not proud.

This is what the fight against hate crime law is about.  This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act.  When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless.  When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too?   But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …

Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.

As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.

Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face. 

Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.

The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.

"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.

"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.

Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.

The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.

Of course no one saw anything.  And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:

Imagine.  Imagine a world, where there was no hate…