Too big a tent

The U.S. Senate has joined the House in voting to expand the federal definition of hate crimes to include acts of violence inspired by a victim’s sexual orientation. Yet by declining to curb some of the House bill’s excesses, the Senate may have assured its failure.

The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after the gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death in 1998, is a well-meaning but over-broad bill that is probably headed for a presidential veto -- if it gets that far. The Senate unwisely attached it to a defense funding authorization from which it could easily be stripped in a conference committee.

The Justice Department already includes anti-gay attacks in its hate-crime statistics. But when it comes to federal assistance for state and local prosecutions, the definition of a hate crime is narrower, encompassing crimes motivated by a victim’s race, color, religion or national origin, but not by a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The legislation approved by both houses would rectify that unconscionable omission. The problem is that it goes further, extending the definition to crimes based on gender or disability. That could give President Bush a pretext for vetoing legislation opposed by his conservative base.

Obviously, acts of violence or intimidation should be prosecuted aggressively regardless of the motive, and no doubt some are motivated by hatred of men or women or even (though this is hard to imagine) of disabled people. But such crimes are rare. According to the FBI, less than 1% of hate crimes in 2005 reflected a bias against the disabled. The FBI doesn’t keep count of gender-bias crimes, but California does. In 2006, “hate crime events” involving gender and disability combined accounted for only 0.8% of incidents, compared to 18.8% of incidents motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation.

Evidence abounds that, like racial minorities, gay Americans are subjected to violence because of who they are. In 2005, according to the FBI, 14.2% of “single-bias” incidents involved sexual-orientation bias. That’s less than the 54.7% attributed to racial bias but more than the 13.2% motivated by “ethnicity/national origin bias.”

It’s understandable why the authors of the legislation erected such a “big tent” -- the longer the list of protected groups, they may have thought, the less controversy. But in legislating so broadly, they have undermined their best argument for adding sexual orientation to the definition of a hate crime: the demonstrated existence of a problem requiring federal intervention in what is ordinarily the business of municipal law enforcement. By targeting the Matthew Shepard law to the all-too-common animus that cost him his life, Congress would make it harder for Bush to argue that it was providing solutions for which there is no problem.