At Last! Finally, the Hate Crimes Bill is Passed and Signed into Law by Obama.
Gee, it only took over a decade and over 77,000 “gay panic” attacks on all members of the GLBT community before this finally got passed…our lovely previous president had threatened to VETO this bill if it ever came across his desk. So much for “compassionate conservatism,” eh? If you want to do the math on that one, it’s equivalent to one hate crime, every hour, of every day from 1998 to 2007 before “change” appeared on the face of America.
At least it finally got done, so it’s now a federal crime to assault someone because they are GLBT or have a varying gender identity.
The bill was named the Matthew Shepard Act (after the Wyoming teenager who was assaulted, and then tied up to a fence to die in the freezing outskirts of Laramie, where he attended college because his two assailants knew he was gay — October 1998), and his mother, Judy, was in attendance when Obama signed the bill into law. That same year, an African-American man, James Byrd Jr., was dragged from behind a truck in Texas until his body was quite literally torn to shreds.
Here is an article over at: CNN
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