Political Quotes

“One of the questions that we need to answer here before this Congress is, what is a hate crime? And that question seems real simple, but the answer to that question is almost always, any crime committed against any individual, especially a violent crime, which requires a certain amount of hatred or jealously, a certain kind of emotional attachment or emotional reaction from the perpetrator towards the victim. I do not know how you could assault or murder or rape someone without having anger or hatred or fury in you. So I will say that any of these crimes here that we are talking about with regard to this are all hate crimes. The question is, what is not a hate crime? I do not have much of an answer to that, unless it be a crime against property rather than people, but I do not believe you can commit a crime against people and not feel an emotional effect one way or another on their personality. So we have two significant cases here that were mentioned by the gentlewoman, the Minority Leader, the James Byrd case and the Matthew Shepard case. In both of those cases, there were murders committed in a most violent, hateful fashion.”