Tom Feeney: “Madam Speaker, whatever any one of us thinks about the merits of the specific language, it does not belong in a defense…”

“Madam Speaker, whatever any one of us thinks about the merits of the specific language, it does not belong in a defense authorization bill. If these provisions were introduced as a freestanding piece of legislation, they would have been referred to the Committee on the Judiciary; and that is where they should appropriately be dealt with, not in a conference on a wholly unrelated topic. Second and more importantly, let me address the merits of the proposal before us. All of us, as the gentlewoman from California pointed out, all of us deplore hate crimes. The perpetrators of such crimes deserve the harshest punishment under the law as the law allows. The evidence indicates that they are receiving such punishments under the current law in a wide majority of the cases. However, this really is misnamed as a hate crimes piece of legislation. What it ought to be called is an unequal protection proposal, because what this bill basically does is to say that the dignity and the property and the person and the life of some Americans gets less protection under the law if we pass this amendment than other American lives. That sort of unequal treatment is exactly what the 14th amendment was designed to prohibit, in my view. I completely understand the positions of those who want this legislation, but I fear they have not fully thought through the potential consequences of adopting this legislation.”