Obama To Celeberate Hate Crimes Bill With Gay Advocates

October 28, 2009 11:54 a.m. EST

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - President Barack Obama hosts a reception at the White House Wednesday night to mark his signing into law of the 2009 and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a bill that LGBT advocates had sought to enact for more than a decade.

The President will deliver brief remarks during the evening event in the East Room, joined by Attorney General Eric Holder, civil rights leaders and lawmakers.

The bill expands federal hate crimes to include attacks based on a person's actual or perceived gender, gender identity or disability or sexual orientation. The original 1969 hate crimes law gives the federal government authority to pursue criminal investigations for crimes committed because of a person's race, color, religion or national origin, and only while the victim is engaging in federally-protected activity.

Democrats and gay advocates first introduced a bill to expand the federal hate crimes law in 1997, and had been pushing hard since 2007 but had failed with the threat of veto from former President George W. Bush.

The updated law is named after two murder victims: Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming university student who died in 1998 after being beaten by a group of men, and James Byrd, Jr., a black man who was dragged to death by white supremacists the same year as Shepard's murder. It will be enacted on Wednesday, when the larger legislation to which it is attached, the 2010 defense budget, is signed by Obama.

The presidential approval comes a week after the Senate passed the defense budget by a 68-29 vote, with all opposing votes except one coming from Republicans. The House approved the same Pentagon bill on Oct. 8 by a vote of 281-46.

Earlier this year, the House voted 249-175 to pass a stand-alone hate-crimes bill, but Democrats came up short in the Senate in April.

Republicans oppose hate crimes legislation because it "places a higher value on some lives than others." They also criticized the attachment of the measure to the defense budget, accusing Democrats of  "using the military as leverage to pass radical social policy."

Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, also said on Tuesday in a column on the Washington Post's "On Faith," that the bill was a "well-intentioned mistake."

"While the problems which [hate crime legislation] address are generally real," he wrote, "and in the case of Gay and Lesbian Americans who face specific dangers on a regular basis simply because they are who they are, such problems are all too real. Nonetheless, such legislation is not the way to correct this problem. Punishing individuals for what they believe and not what they have done is a scary precedent which avoids the real cultural challenges we face and potentially devalues the significance of crimes not rising to the level of a hate crime. Just ask the victims' families."

But advocacy groups have been celebrating the Senate vote since last week, hailing the 14th floor vote on the legislation that took 12 years to enact.

"We look forward to President Obama's signing a strong hate crimes bill into law today," said Michael Cole, new media director for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest LGBT advocacy group. "The work of families like the Shepards and Byrds - and the thousands of others who have suffered because of hate violence - is what has brought us to this historic moment today."