Hates Crimes - Pennsylvania - Compassion

A long awaited Hates Crimes Bill recently made it through the Pennsylvania state House Judiciary Committee.

Pa. House panel approves hate-crimes bill

Two years after a court threw out language that extended the state's hate-crimes law to protect gays, women, and the disabled, a bill to reinstate those protections has cleared its first hurdle in the General Assembly.

With the Political Incorrectness typical of the national Republican Party – it is reflected in the Country Club locker room rhetoric of a local state Representative:

An opponent of the bill, Rep. Tim Krieger (R., Westmoreland), said justice was "supposed to be blind" and not recognize the status of the victim or the accused. The bill says "some people are more equal than others," he asserted.

The bill is likely to pass in the House and faces a tough uphill battle in the Republican controlled Senate.

The remarks of Representative Krieger seems to reflect sentiments of some in Indiana County, next door to Kreiger’s neck of the woods Westmoreland county in a small community that had a cross burning over the weekend.

Family: Black player targeted in western Pa. cross burning

State police are investigating a cross burning in western Pennsylvania outside a home of a white family who have taken in a black child who plays for the local high school football team.

State police say they still don't know who burned the six-foot wooden cross that Joe and Mary Walbeck found charred in their yard early Sunday. The Walbecks live in West Wheatfield Township, Indiana County, about 50 miles east of Pittsburgh.

James Carville, a famous political consultant to Bill Clinton among others has been quoted as saying that Pennsylvania is "two cities (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) separated by Alabama."

I know that there are many decent people in between Philly and Pittsburgh who would not or could burn crosses. In fact I think this incident in Indiana County is a throwback to the past. It does not take too much imagination to see someone jealous of this young man and his athletic abilities trying to scare him. The irony in all this is that few if any noticed the cross burning until it was all over. Yawn! The days of raw aggressive hate in this nation are over and gone into recession?

And then again, ugly hate spills over as in the 1998 torture and killing of a gay Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

The Hack Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx stood on the floor of the House of Representatives in DC and said that the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Bill was not necessary because Matthew’s death was not a hate crime. She called that Hate Crime bill a “Hoax”. That Shepard was not killed because he was gay. He was killed as the result of a botched robbery attempt.

I don’t know if or how she framed, distorted the lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Texas in 1998? It must have been a doozy and oozing with non-compassion for her fellow humanity. That is if she, true southern belle that she is, even bothered to find the time to mention the murder of an African-American.

Where is your compassion Virginia Foxx?

Where is your compassion Tim Kreiger?

The shrinking festering core of the Republican Party lacks compassion. Until that party finds humanity and love and respect of humanity other than its phony anti-choice rhetoric, the nation cannot heal itself and be rid of the masked unofficial fostered policies – is it hatred – of the GOP.

Where is your Compassion?