The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-15-2014

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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Column 1-15-2014
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Left's 'Hate Crime' Agenda
Using 'Hate Crime' Hoaxes to Undermine Liberty

By Mark Alexander

Jan. 15, 2014

“There is in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong, a love of truth and a veneration of virtue … if the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice…” –John Adams (1775)

My last column, “The ‘Gay Agenda’ v. Liberty1,” outlined recent examples of how the Left’s assault on marriage and family is a façade for their frontal assault on the First Amendment and, by extension, two of the most critical pillars of Liberty. The Democratic Party2 has cleverly seized upon the sympathies of tens of millions of mostly young and female voters, enticing them to become unwitting pawns who “feel good” about “gay rights.” But the Leftist ideologues3 who now oversee the once-proud Democratic Party understand that the overarching strategy is to constrict Liberty and empower their statist politicos and bureaucrats.

As a follow up, this column focuses on how the Left canonizes “victims” of so-called “hate crimes” in order to expand voter constituencies. They do so by politicizing assaults against members of minority groups, which typically support Democrats – qualifying those crimes as being of a more hateful class of offenses than the same crimes against others who are not a member of that constituency. The co-opting of these identity voter blocs follows the Left’s tried-and-true politics of disparity4 paradigm.

For background, “hate crimes” today are the evolutionary political product of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which expanded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to outlaw any effort to “injure, intimidate or interfere with anyone [engaged in protected activities], by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin.” The original proscription of such discrimination sounds reasonable – but in the 50 years since passage of the 1964 Act, that reason has twisted to comport with Leftist political agendas.

For example, among the key protected activities in the ‘68 legislation are seeking entrance to educational institutions and equal employment opportunities, which, by way of legislated and court-ordered affirmative action criteria, created an epidemic of reverse discrimination – which polarized the American people and further firmed up those already loyal Democrat constituencies.

But the current political “hate crime” classification is a far more insidious defilement of the Civil Rights Act than affirmative action.

I should state for the record that I believe ALL violent crimes are hate crimes, and no assault on a fellow citizen is more demanding of justice than another similar assault, regardless of the race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation of the victim. The notion that one murder is more deserving of justice than another is itself an assault on the principles of the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal justice under the law.

The Left’s hate crimes hoax agenda is advanced by race hustlers5, those awful opportunists who never let the truth get in the way of their political agenda. That was aptly demonstrated in the national crusade to elevate to “hate crime” status the self-defense shooting of a Florida hoodlum, Trayvon Martin6, by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman. That crusade was a political maneuver that dovetailed conveniently with Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

Now, if race hustlers were really interested in the Truth versus manufactured hate crimes hoaxes, they would have been too busy focusing on Obama’s hometown of Chicago, which, between the date of Trayvon Martin’s death and verdict in Zimmerman’s trial, recorded more than 700 murders of black residents, almost all of whom were killed by other black or “black Hispanic” gangbangers. But Obama and his racist cadres never mentioned a single one of those deaths, or thousands of such others across the nation, because those murders did not fit their political agenda. And now that the 2012 campaign has concluded, the race hustlers have stopped insisting that Martin’s death be treated as a hate crime.

Fact is, the per-capita black-on-white assaults and murders nationwide grossly outnumbers that of white-on-black assaults and murders, but there has never been a national campaign to classify one of the former as a race-based “hate crime” – not even in horrendous cases such as the torture/rape/murders of a young white couple, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom7 by five black thugs.

Unquestionably, in the majority of black-on-white crimes, race is a key factor, but you won’t hear that from a Democrat.

While elevating rare white-on-black assaults to political “hate crime” status is an erroneous adulteration of the law, more fallacious is the awarding of that classification to rare assaults ostensibly based on sexual orientation.

Indeed, there is no more infamous example of the truth being trumped by the Left’s “hate crime” constituency development agenda than the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. As you may recall, Shepard was savagely beaten, tortured and left for dead by two other young men, who claimed the “gay panic” defense, suggesting that Shepard had approached them for sex and they responded by murdering him.

Upon his death, the Left canonized Shepard as the poster boy for violence against homosexuals, a fitting cause célèbre to advance “hate crime” legislation. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) proclaimed, “Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement.”

There were two plays, three films and a documentary about Shepard. Pop musicians including Elton John, Melissa Etheridge and Lady Gaga wrote songs about him. There was a “passion play” called “The Laramie Project,” portraying Shepard as a martyr, which played in theaters and schools across the nation. It was “one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The Matthew Shepard Foundation8 became the hub for his legacy.

Ted Kennedy led the charge to pass the “Matthew Shepard Act,” amending the Civil Rights “hate crime” legislation to include “sexual orientation.” Obama ceremonially signed that legislation into law in 2009 after passage by Democrat majorities in the House and Senate.

But now there is a problem: Truth is trumping the myth.