Obama signed the stupid piece of legislation this week. Figured I should mention it. To underscore how inane and childish this legislation is — it is named the Matthew Shepard/James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Law.
Would Byrd’s name be attached if George W. Bush hadn’t been the Governor of Texas? Would this new law have punished Byrd’s murderers any more than they were? No — two were sentenced to death, the other will spend the rest of his life in jail.
Stupid, childish, petty Democrats run our nation. Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats and Obama oppose things like free-market healthcare reform, free-market social security reforms, and tax reforms that would actually do something for gay families. And the Islamist Pogrom of Gays? Democrats are silent.
Never forget that, folks. But when you murder someone this weekend, just make sure you don’t yell nasty things at them first.
*sheesh*
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
Let's consider the facts:
1/ The Bush Derangement Syndrome Argument:
Some advocacy groups, such as the NAACP National Voter Fund, made an issue of this case during George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 2000. They accused Bush of implicit racism since, as governor of Texas, he opposed special hate crime legislation. Also, citing a prior commitment, Bush declined to appear at Byrd's funeral. Because two of the three murderers were sentenced to death and the third to life in prison (all charged with and convicted of capital murder, the highest felony level in Texas), Governor Bush maintained that "we don't need tougher laws". However, after Governor Rick Perry inherited the balance of Bush's unexpired term, the 77th Texas Legislature passed the James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Act on May 11, 2001.
Was the Republican-controlled Texas legislature slagging the new President? If it's as obvious as Bruce says, why doesn't he cite chapter and verse?
The bill was known as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2001, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2009. It wasn't until early 2009 that the Senate version was titled the Matthew Shepard Hate Crime Prevention Act.
At the time, Dianne Hardy Garcia was the executive director of the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, now Equality Texas. She had been working on passage of a hate crime law for at least four sessions of the legislature. Because of the horror of this crime, Byrd’s name was attached to the bill. But before adding his name, Garcia went to Jasper to speak to Byrd’s mother and sister.
She explained to the family that a hate crime law would pass without controversy if sexual orientation were not included. Mrs. Byrd had only one question for Garcia.
She asked if gays and lesbians were the targets of hate crimes.
Garcia said that it depended on the year and whether local authorities even reported those crimes, but annually, the LGBT community is the second or third largest target of hate in Texas.
Mrs. Byrd didn’t have to think twice.
She said, “No family should have to go through what my family did.”
Since then she and her family have been outspoken allies of the LGBT community. In 2000, Mrs. Byrd spoke at the Millennium March in Washington, D.C., which Garcia chaired.
2/ Tax reforms that would actually do something for gay families:
Writing at The New Majority, Henry Clay picked up this one in April:
[Conservatives] should co-sponsor something like the Tax Equity for Domestic Partner and Health Plan Beneficiaries Act. As the debate over health care reform has demonstrated, the tax code promotes employer-provided health coverage in large measure by excluding from income the value of a health care policy provided to employees. As corporate America has extended health benefits to domestic partners, however, an inequity has emerged in the tax code. The share of employer-provided health care premiums going to an employee’s spouse is excludable from the employee’s income. The same is not true for an employee’s domestic partner, however. For a gay employee, the value of his partner’s health coverage is included as phantom income, and the employee must pay taxes on it.
Proudly supporting this legislation, or something like it, need not undermine the GOP’s commitment to traditional marriage. The law would be a value-neutral exclusion of the employer’s share of premiums from income. Yet, when this bill was introduced in the 110th Congress by Senator Gordon Smith, not one Republican Senator joined him in co-sponsoring the legislation.
Clay added:
Similarly, homosexuals are treated inequitably in the operation of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), even though the individual actually owns that account and makes his own contributions to it.
Conservatives should own this issue.
Under current law, a gay employee who is eligible for domestic partner benefits, could enroll in an HSA-eligible high deductible family plan. Having enrolled in that family plan, he would be eligible for a tax deductible contribution to his HSA, much larger than that available to a person with individual coverage. Yet even though he is eligible to contribute a larger amount to his HSA, and even though his partner is covered under the health plan, his partner’s use of the HSA for ordinary medical care would not qualify as a tax-deductible health related expense.
Republicans should support a change to this treatment of HSAs as a matter of fairness. They should support it on the grounds of sound health care policy. And they should support it because it would force Congressional Democrats to choose between their irrational hostility toward HSAs and gay citizens who seek freedom and choice in their health care.
Even in the Cloud-cuckoo Land GPats inhabits, it's hard to find a rational way to rap Democrats for not passing legislation gay conservatives' own party members don't want them to benefit from. You want Republicans to do your bidding? Get them elected. Like the homophobic conservative party candidate running for Congress in the 23rd district of New York, whom GPats has endorsed because the Republican candidate was too liberal on, among other things, gay rights.
3/ The Islamist pogrom against gays:
This is where the GPats logic turns into a Mobius strip. Here's a link to their comments on the subject. Make sense of them if you can.
Best as Waldo can tell, American gays who complain Obama's not active enough on their issues are hypocrites because they don't also demand action on Iran's treatment of gays given that the right-wing Prime Minister of Israel called the Iranians out on it. But there's scores of countries that are as bad or worse. GPats got agitated about the proposed Uganda Death to Gays Law recently, even though- as a commenter noted- "When will our leaders stand up and demand that America stop exporting Christian hatred and homophobia to former gay sanctuaries like Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Somalia, Darfur, Iran, Libya, and Iraq?!"
Indeed.
Oh, the other stuff in the post that got us started? Free market healt care reform? Free market social security reform? For the former; show us a plan. For the latter, six words: private accounts invested by Wall Street.
No comments:
Post a Comment