LIBERAL HYPOCRISY AT ITS WORST

Recently, the Congress passed and the President signed into law, a statute that funds the Department of Defense for the coming fiscal year. Glad to hear it—providing for the common defense is one of the six purposes of the Constitution set forth in its preamble. But the joy with which liberals greeted the bill had nothing to do with the common defense or any other legitimate federal purpose.

They had attached a rider to the bill, making it a separate “hate crime” to commit an offense against a gay person. Now, I happen to think that it is despicable for one person to commit any crime against another. So do the States and the Federal government. They have outlawed literally thousands of illegal acts—ranging from murder and assault to running a red light.

But that was not enough for the liberals. They want to create a new constitutional right without resort to that messy amendment process established in the Constitution. And what is that right, you ask?

They want to enshrine in statute a “right” to be liked. And to do that, they attached an irrelevant rider to a necessary and legitimately constitutional bill. Now, that is nothing new. Riders are nearly as old as the republic. The Constitution of the Confederate States of America (1861) actually prohibited riders.

But what caught my attention was Senator Harry Reid’s subsequent outburst about the attempts by Republicans to attach riders to the so-called health-care bills. You see, in a liberal’s mind, they have a right to act in any way they want, but the other side may not. Hypocrisy!!!

The “hate crime” bill is necessary, we are told, because murdering someone who you do not like is even more terrible than simply murdering the victim. (I doubt that the victim much cares why he was killed.) We have to make thought and passion a crime, and when we do that, it is but a short step to outlawing mere thought.

And that is what the “hate crimes” bills do—they make a person’s thoughts criminal. That requires the jury to get into the killer’s heads. Nancy Pelosi is overjoyed that we can now punish a killer, not for the act of murder, but for the thoughts that led to the crime. But only if the thoughts are directed toward the liberals’ friends.

Yesterday, I heard liberal commentators repeatedly argue that Maj. Malik Nadal Hasan could not be charged with a hate crime, “because we have no way of determining why he did such a thing.” So, a guy who is a Muslim, who has written adopting the hateful precepts of radical Islam, and who shouted “Allah Akbar” as he blazed away, cannot be charged with a hate crime, but someone who guns down a black kid on the street can? Seems to me that Major Hasan made it clear that he did not like the soldiers he killed and wounded.

Don’t all victims have the same right to be liked? Obviously not!

The good news is that in each instance, the murderer can be charged with, tried for, and if convicted, punished for his conduct. And that ought be enough to satisfy anyone.