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Open Forum: Are We Ready for a Gay Leader?
1 hour ago
Friday, March 14, 2008
Mother of slain S.C. gay man comes to Atlanta
Elke Kennedy, the mother of a slain South Carolina gay man, visits Atlanta Sunday to speak about the need for a federal hate crimes law.
Kennedy will speak at First Metropolitan Community Church, 1379 Tullie Road, at 3 p.m. on March 16, according to a press release from PFLAG Atlanta. Her son, Sean Kennedy, 20, was killed May 16, 2007, after leaving a Greenville County bar. His attacker called him a “faggot.”
The beating caused Sean’s brain to separate from his brain stem and ricochet inside his skull. He was taken off life support later that night. Although South Carolina police investigated Sean’s death as a hate crime, prosecutors said there was no evidence of “malicious intent” to kill, and charged Stephen Moller, 18 at the time of the murder, with involuntary manslaughter in October. The manslaughter charge carries a maximum of five years in prison.
“It’s bad enough that you have to lose a child and deal with all of that, but then on top of that you have to deal with the fact that they’re saying your son deserved to die, or that [Moller] really didn’t mean to do it, so we’re just going to give him a slap on the wrist,” Kennedy told Southern Voice last week.
Georgia and South Carolina do not have hate crimes laws. The only three other states without hate crimes law are Arkansas, Indiana and Wyoming, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Of the 45 states and the District of Columbia with hate crime laws, 32 cover sexual orientation.
The federal hate crimes law, known as the Matthew Shepard Act and named for the young man killed 10 years ago because he was gay, also continues to stall in Congress.
The Shepard bill would give the federal government authority to prosecute hate crimes against gays and transgender persons as well as against persons with disabilities. Existing federal law allows federal authorities to prosecute hate crimes targeting people because of their race, religion or ethnicity.
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4 comments:
I did some investigation following our conversation from yesterday, Tom, and discovered that my state does have hate crime legislation on the books:
(f) Was substantially motivated to commit the crime because of hostility towards the victim's religion, race, creed, sexual orientation as defined in RSA 21:49, national origin or sex;
I still wish to hell we didn't NEED hate crime provisions - that EVERY crime would be treated equally - but I recognize the need for it in the real world.
I'm with you and wish we didn't need them as well.
Here's a bit of history about it:
The FBI's role in civil rights investigations dates back to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This legislation was passed by Congress after President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on November 23, 1963, and called for them "to write the next chapter of equal rights and to write it in the book of law." Prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government, under the leadership of both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, took the position that protection of civil rights was a local function, not a federal one. However, the murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964, provided the impetus for a visible and sustained federal effort to protect and foster civil rights for blacks. MIBURN, as the case was called (it stood for Mississippi Burning), became the largest federal investigation ever conducted in Mississippi. On October 20, 1967, seven men were convicted of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of the slain civil rights workers. All seven were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to ten years.
I wonder how many black people had to die before it happened.
I also wonder how many gays will have to die before we get it.
I'm familiar with the FBI case - I teach Mississippi Burning (the film) as literature in my classes - but I WASN'T aware of its role in the passage of hate crimes legislation.
I agree that it's necessary for there to be an overriding authority on how certain things (commerce, prosecution of crime, etc.) are dealt with in the individual states. I appreciate our experiment in a plural democracy, but we can't be a UNITED states until we all agree on certain foundational values.
Thanks for teaching stuff many shy away from.
These are important lessons.
I hate to sound like the bible thumpers, but I think if the world doesn't become more tolerant it will rip itself apart at the seams.
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