Hate Crime Law
In Michigan, a Christian group filed a lawsuit claiming that the package of Matthew Sheppard hate crime laws are intended to remove their beliefs.
Of course this is tinfoil-hat bullshit, but it only gets better; Richard Thompson of Thomas More Law Center writes:
“The sole purpose of this law is to criminalize the Bible and use the threat of federal prosecutions and long jail sentences to silence Christians from expressing their Biblically-based religious belief that homosexual conduct is a sin.”
Either Mr. Thompson doesn’t know that the package of crime laws does not apply to freedom of speech; or he believes that violence and murder towards homosexuals is a valid and socially acceptable expression of Christian faith.
It’s appalling when someone twists a religion to fit their platform of hate towards people they don’t approve. Thanks, fanatics, for making the rest of us look bad.
It’s not as far-fetched as you’d like it to be. While criminal prosecution would be difficult as all cases of “incitement to commit a criminal act” our plaintiff-centric tort system (lawsuits) could easily make use of the Matthew Sheppard to file suits against religious groups whose individual members committed what were decided to be “hate crimes.”
Violence towards homosexuals is indeed a hate crime, but from a Biblical perspective, homosexuality is a sin.