http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?...sc3=&id=103411
Quote:
The Oklahoma state senate has approved a bill that would allow the state to "opt out" of the first federal law to extend hate crimes protections to LGBTs.
Oklahoma State Senator Steve Russell sponsored an amendment to a bill that empowers the state to destroy information relevant to hate crimes investigations, rather than sharing that information with federal authorities. Russell’s justification for this was that he wanted to avoid a situation in which federal officials took a case out of the jurisdiction of local law enforcement.
Russell also worried that The Matthew Shepard James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which was signed into law by President Obama last year, might be used to prosecute Christians who speak out against gays because of their religious convictions. Though the measure includes guarantees designed to protect First Amendment freedoms, opponents have blasted the Act for creating a new class of "thought crimes," and worried that the law would be used to suppress religious expression, including readings of anti-gay Biblical passages.
Religious and conservative pundits lost no time following President Obama’s Oct. 28, 2009 signing of the bill into law. Anti-gay religious site OneNewsNow posted an article that same day warning that Christian broadcasting companies feared the law could be used to squelch anti-gay content. The article quoted Craig Parshall, a lawyer for National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) as saying that the broadcasting of anti-gay rhetoric that inspires in individual to attack an LGBT person might lead to charges against the broadcaster.
Parshall also made use of frequently employed argument that children might be "indoctrinated" by gays, saying, "Public school curriculum could be built entirely on the idea of what is illegal hate in our culture.... And our children could be indoctrinated [to believe that] if you criticize another religion or mention Jesus as being the only way, that’s hateful--[or] if you say that homosexuality is a sin, that’s hateful." The article went on to say that Parshall regarded the law as designed to silence Christians and squelch dissent toward the gay "lifestyle."
Alliance Defense Fund lawyer Erik Stanley echoed that interpretation in an Oct. 28 article at anti-gay site WorldNetDaily, saying, "Bills of this sort are designed to forward a political agenda and silence critics, not combat actual crime.... The bottom line is that we do not need a law that creates second-class victims in America and that gives the government the opportunity to ignore the First Amendment."
Russell spoke out against the federal hate crimes protections provided by the law, which provides funding for hate crimes investigations that the state will lose if the bill is passed. "The bill gives the federal government power that was not given to them in the Constitution," Russell said, according to a March 12 article at Out In Tulsa.com. "I am aware of the supremacy of the federal government over state governments, but the federal requirements are vague enough for us to make actions," Russell added. "We just have to be very careful on how we proceed."
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