President Obama will sign an expansion of the Federal Hate Crime law today, making it a federal crime to physically attack a person because of their sexual orientation.
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act is named for two murder victims. James Byrd, Jr. was an African-American killed in Texas in 1998. Shepard was a gay Wyoming teenager who died after being kidnapped and severely beaten in 1998.
Jeffrey Waldo, an officer of UNM’s Queer Straight Alliance, said passing the bill is a necessary step for progress in society.
“The Matthew Shepard Act was first introduced in 2001,” he said. “Eight years later — it’s about time it passes.”
UNM Police Department Spokesman Robert Haarhues said violent hate crimes are rare on campus.
“It’s not something we deal with a lot here at UNM,” he said. “There have been no reported cases of hate crimes on campus either this year or last year.”
However, at the national level there have been more than 77,000 hate crime incidents reported by the FBI between 1998 and 2007, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Associated Press.
Haarhues said UNMPD would adhere to state statutes pertaining to hate crimes if an incident occurred on campus, but the Matthew Shepard Act would increase severity in sentencing.
“We would deal with the situation according to protocol,” he said. “We would write it up as a hate crime battery assault and present it to the district attorney. From there, the sentence would be enhanced and the convicted person would probably serve their time in a federal prison.”
Waldo said the legislation will alter the national state of violent hate crimes toward people because of their sexual orientation.
“It will hopefully lower the instances of hate crimes in America,” he said. “It will further protect gay, lesbian and transgender people from being victims of hate crimes.”
Student Ali Ghadimi said that he was skeptical about the bill’s effectiveness because the punishment wouldn’t deter intolerant individuals from committing hate crimes.
“It doesn’t seem like people that are that intolerant of those things would be affected by the caliber of discipline enough to change their actions,” he said.
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Waldo said acts of violence toward the homosexual community will be handled differently when Obama approves the bill.
“There were two transgender prostitutes murdered recently — most likely due to their sexual preferences and occupation,” he said. “If the people that had done that had been caught and prosecuted under the Matthew Shepard Act, it would be different.”
On a national level, the bill has social implications, Waldo said, like providing a means for transition to repealing the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,”.
“DADT is a blatant case of institutional homophobia,” he said. “It perpetuates the idea that non-hetero identities are invalid and perverse, which negatively affects people throughout the nation, even those who have never been in the military.”
Student Emily Schmeltzer said that the legislation is a good idea in theory but won’t make that big of an impact.
“I do think that it is a good thing, but I think that it is becoming more acceptable for people to be homosexual in our society,” she said. “People are becoming more tolerant, so I don’t think that it will change anything.”
