EDGE San Francisco

Opponents of legal protections for GLBTs have often (and often successfully) sought to confuse gays with pedophiles in the mind of the public.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the Rev. Pat Robertson, and others have resorted to that time-tested stratagem in their attempt to derail the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act, which is also known as the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act after a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and left to die outside of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.

Right-wing opponents of the measure have come up with a new moniker for the bill. They are now calling it the "Pedophile Protection Act," notes a May 4 item posted at anti-gay religious news site WorldNetDaily.

The WND item, in which an offer is embedded to send a "signed" letter "to all 100 senators" for the bargain price of only $10.95, claimed that the bill would extend legal protection to individuals suffering from mental illnesses, including "all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or ’paraphilias’ listed by the American Psychiatric Association."

The APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1975. The APA defines "sexual orientation" as "refer[ing] to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes," according to text at the Web site.

The text at the site continues, "sexual orientation is usually discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), gay/lesbian (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex), and bisexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to both men and women)," but that definition does not include fetishes or criminal behavior such as rape or child molestation.

Moreover, despite right-wing attempts to characterize homosexuality as a mental illness, the APA makes it clear that being gay is not considered a "paraphlia" or mental illness of any sort by the professional mental health community, with the site’s text reading, "lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are not disorders.

"Research has found no inherent association between any of these sexual orientations and psychopathology," the APA site continues.

"Both heterosexual behavior and homosexual behavior are normal aspects of human sexuality. Both have been documented in many different cultures and historical eras."

Th site’s text goes on to note, "Lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships are normal forms of human bonding. Therefore, these mainstream organizations long ago abandoned classifications of homosexuality as a mental disorder."

WorldNetDaily does not include mention of the APA’s definitions after citing the group’s inclusion of hundreds of known "paraphilias" in its professional literature, but the anti-gay site does go to claim that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act "creates a special class for homosexuals and others with alternative sexual lifestyles and provides them protections against so-called ’hate.’"

The article also claims that the Act "specifically denies such protections to other targeted classes of citizens such as pastors, Christians, missionaries, veterans and the elderly."

Others have noted that the Act does not to "deny" rights to anybody, but simply add sexual orientation, as well as disability, to a list of federally protected demographics that are disproportionately targeted for hate crimes.

Existing federal law already provides for enhanced penalties for those who target victims for violent crime based on color, race, nationality, and religion.

If the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act is signed into law, heterosexuals who are targeted for violent crime on the basis of their sexual preference for members of the opposite gender would also be protected.

However, in any case on alleged hate crime involving sexual orientation, be it straight, gay, or bisexual, a burden of proof will have to be satisfied: it will be required to show that the perpetrator targeted the victim because of his or her actual or perceived sexual orientation.

Anti-gay social and religious conservatives have long fought against inclusion of GLBTs under federal hate crimes legislation, resorting to claims that this would constitute "special rights" granted to gays that others do not enjoy, despite the lengthy list of others who already are protected by federal statute.

However, some in the GLBT community and in the liberal and libertarian community also believe that hate crimes legislation should not be extended to GLBTs.

Even at the time of the trial for Matthew Shepard’s killers, William Dobbs of Queer Watch was vocal about the issue, saying, "The [existing] criminal laws cover every kind of victim, no matter how beloved or reviled, from the white-haired grandmother that garners sympathy from all to the seediest low-life that many might say ’deserved it’--with gradations for intent.

"The real challenge is to get the law applied in such a fashion as to give justice," Dobbs argued. "Twisting the law out of shape is not a cure for cases that the criminal justice system will not reckon with in an even-handed manner."

Promoting a more universal application of existing law, Dobbs said, would result in "much better justice" not only for GLBT victims of violent crime, but for all.

Such even-handedness escapes the anti-gay contingent, however, as they smear the gay community with the "pedophile" brush.

A Citypages blog posted Emily Kaiser on April 29 noted that Rep. Bachmann reiterated a number of canards offered by those opposed to hate-crimes laws, many of the rationales sounding like laments for lost social sanctionings that uphold and applaud violent acts carried out against gays.

Bachmann claimed that adding GLBTs to the federally protected demographics would deprive Americans of their rights to free speech, an argument that rings as similar to the claims made recently by foes of marriage equality that if gay and lesbian families are allowed to wed, people of faith will find their freedom of religion eroded.

Bachmann claimed that the Act "gives government literally the key over deciding what the thoughts of Americans should be."

Bachmann then went on to make her claim that the Act would protect individuals who prey sexually upon children, saying that, "apparently people who are practicing pedophiles would be considered protected under this legislation, but not, I understand, veterans, not, I understand, pregnant women, not, I understand, 85-year-old grandmothers would be protected under this law.

"But who would be protected?" Bachmann continued. "A pedophile, someone who considers themselves gay, someone who considers themselves transgender, someone who considers themselves a cross-dresser?

"That is who is protected," stated Bachmann.

The spurious claim that criminals would be protected under the Act echoes earlier claims that the measure’s non-specificity as to the meaning of "sexual orientation" would encompass a wide variety of fetishes and illegal sexual activities such as the rape of children.

As reported in an April 30 item at EDGE, the American Family Association claimed that no fewer than thirty "orientations" would fall under the protection of the bill.

Rather than limiting the list to true sexual orientations, however, the AMA compiled a glossary of fetishes, including those that eroticize the stumps of amputated limbs, bodily wastes, erotic asphyxiation, and other fetishes listed by the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which has not included homosexuality among it list of mental disorders for over 30 years.

The list also included "heterosexuality," which is a sexual orientation, but which the AMA’s list defined as "the universal norm of sexuality with those of the opposite sex," as well as bisexuality.

"Homosexual/Gay/Lesbian" was also listed, but as a noun, rather than as an adjective or descriptive word applying to sexual practices or fetishes; the terms, which were lumped together, were given the umbrella definition of "people who form sexual relationships primarily or exclusively with members of their own gender."

The list of sexual practices and fetishes that the AMA claimed would fall under protection of the bill also included "prostitution," "necrophilia," "bestiality," and "pedophilia."

The anti-gay Web site Americans for Truth About Homosexuality carried a story about an analysis of the bill reportedly prepared by Shawn Akers, who, according to text at the site, serves as a policy analyst for the anti-gay organization Liberty Counsel.

Akers also was credited in the article as being an Adjunct Professor of Law at the law school of the conservative religious school Liberty University.

Calling gays and lesbians "Preferred Victims," the "analysis" offered by Akers suggested that local law enforcement would concentrate more resources on solving hate crimes cases due to a promise of federal funds allocated to enforcing the law. The analysis warned that such cases would be pursued "to the exclusion and neglect of less valuable victims," and would constitute a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 14 Amendment.

However, criminal actions are not generally considered to be "orientations." Nor are fetishes, in which certain specific sexual acts may be found gratifying by those who engage in them.

Bachmann, the City Pages blog reported, made the claim that under the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a gay person who targeted a heterosexual person for violent crime would not be liable to the same enhanced penalties under the law--an argument that directly contradicted both the language of the bill.

Similar anti-gay rhetoric was also used by spiritual leaders, with Pat Robertson attempting to characterize the measure as a bill that would extend legal protection to the criminal actions of child molesters.

Despite the fact that the vast majority of pedophiles are heterosexual, anti-gay religions have long spoken of pedophiles as though they were one and the same; indeed, the Catholic Church responded to its own pedophile crisis by barring open homosexuals from admission into seminaries.

In the case of Robertson, according to an April 30 article at Jabberwonk, the televangelist aired his insinuation on religious program The 700 Club, saying, "Ladies and gentleman just figure this, you’ve got somebody who’s really weird, and his sexual orientation is he likes to have sex with ducks. Is he protected under hate crime?

"Is he protected if he likes to have sex with little boys? They haven’t made that clear."

Echoing rhetoric that confuses criminal sexual conduct and mental illness with sexual orientation, Robertson added, "It’s sexual orientation, which is said covers about 30 different pathologies, and what are we going to do about that?"

The Jabberwonk article noted, "The legislative definition of sexual orientation has doesn’t include pedophilia. It never has.

"Sexual orientation is defined as the attraction of an individual to members of the same, opposite, or both sexes.

"Sexual orientation has nothing to do with pedophilia."

The WorldNetDaily article quoted Republican Texas congressman Louis Gohmert as concocting a scenario in which sexual predators are protected by the measure, while the mothers of young victims are prosecuted by it:

"If a mother hears that their child has been raped and she slaps the assailant with her purse, she is now gone after as a hate criminal because this is a protected class," Gohmert declaimed.

"There are other protected classes in here. I mean simple exhibitionism. I have female friends who have told me over the years that some guy flashed them, and their immediate reaction was to hit them with their purse.

"Well now, he’s committed a misdemeanor, she has committed a federal hate crime because the exhibitionism is protected under sexual orientation," added the congressman.