IGF CultureWatch

If I were the religious type, I might be preparing for Armageddon right now.

You see, last weekend my partner Mark and I drove out to his parents' house to help with yard work. This in itself would be unremarkable except that, as recently as Christmas, Mark's father insisted that I would be welcome at their house "over [his] dead body."

We arrive. Mark's father greets us at the door. He appears to be breathing normally. This is progress.

Mark and I have been together for nearly six years. When we first started dating, he was fresh out of law school, living with his parents while he looked for a job. He had not yet come out to them. "I figured I should wait until I had someone special in my life to tell them about," he explained to me.

"Isn't that sweet," I replied to him. "What a bad idea," I thought to myself.

Just as I feared: when Mark finally did come out to his parents, I personified for them everything that had gone wrong. I was "that man" (they could never bring themselves to use my name) who had corrupted their son. Never mind that Mark had been dating guys for years before meeting me: in their minds, his being gay was all my fault.

We hoped that their wrath would subside quickly, but it didn't. They refused to come to our house. They refused, even, to meet me. So we decided to ambush them. One Sunday, Mark's sister invited everyone out to lunch. "We won't tell them you're coming," she explained sympathetically. "In a public place, they'll have to be nice to you."

Mark's family is Asian. Like many Asians, they believe in "saving face." They abhor public scenes. (By contrast, my family is Italian. We believe in expressing ourselves. Public scenes are our forte.)

When Mark's parents arrived at the restaurant that day, Mark took a deep breath and blurted out, "Mom, Dad, this is John."

"Nice to meet you," I offered. They responded with a look that could wilt flowers.

We managed to get through lunch. But our ambush only caused them to dig in their heels deeper. They refused to attend Mark's 30th birthday dinner because "that man" would be there. They refused to attend his sister's engagement party because we were hosting it at our house. We seriously worried that they might refuse to attend her wedding.

When they finally bought their plane tickets for the wedding (held at a Mexican resort, on "neutral" territory), we were apprehensive. "These all-inclusive resorts have unlimited alcoholic beverages?" we asked his sister. "We'll need them."

Adding to the drama was the fact that my own parents would be attending. My Sicilian mother meets my Filipino mother-in-law. An irresistible force meets an immovable object. Our friends wanted ringside seats.

The wedding went off without a hitch. My parents-who have been wonderfully supportive-introduced themselves to Mark's parents. "You have such a lovely family," my mother said to Mark's mother. I watched for the flower-wilting look, but I couldn't detect it. Maybe the margaritas had kicked in.

But it wasn't just the margaritas. The wedding seems to have been a turning point. Maybe it was Mark's parents' seeing us interact closely with my parents, and realizing that they were missing out. Maybe it was their seeing that I actually had parents, rather than having emerged directly from hell. Whatever it was, they softened. Dramatically.

Mother's Day came, and we all went out to brunch. I didn't have to ambush them.

Father's Day came, and they actually visited our house. They complimented us on our garden, our food, our furniture. When they finally drove away, I turned to Mark and said, "Who were those people and what have they done with your parents?"

"I have no idea," he replied, dazed.

Then last weekend we went over to help them with weeding and planting. "John, work in the shade," his mother insisted. "The sun is too hot." She brought me a towel so I wouldn't have to kneel on rocky soil. She brought me bottles of cold water. (I checked the caps before drinking them. Tamper-proof.) Both she and his father were extremely gracious, and I don't think it was just for the free yard work.

In recent years gays have seen tremendous social and legal progress. There is much work to be done. But some of the most important work, and the most powerful, occurs on a small scale. It's mothers' introducing themselves to mothers-in-law (even when there is no "law" recognizing the relationship). It's yard work; it's brunch. Raise a margarita and drink to that.

There have been several attempts to expand federal hate-crime statutes, both to incorporate sexual orientation as one of the specified classes in the law and to increase federal involvement in the investigation and prosecution of these types of crimes. Each time the proposed bill has failed to pass.

The latest iteration of this legislation is the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007, approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 3 and now under consideration by the Senate.

One might oppose this bill for the wrong reasons, motivated by an animus against gay and lesbian Americans that refuses to acknowledge them in the law.

One might also oppose this bill for the right reasons, supporting the dignity of gay individuals but objecting on constitutional, legal, and philosophical grounds.

Hate-crime laws at the federal level violate the constitutional division of government by federalizing crimes that should be handled by state authorities.

Legal scholar Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute told members of the House Judiciary Committee in April that the proposed law expands federal authority in an unconstitutional manner. He cited Chief Justice John Marshall, who observed that Congress had "no general right to punish murder committed within any of the States" and that it was "clear that Congress cannot punish felonies generally." Over time, however, Congress asserted that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution granted it the authority that Marshall said did not exist. Regarding this development, Lynch testified:

This Congress should not exacerbate the errors of past Congresses by federalizing more criminal offenses. The Commerce Clause is not a blank check for Congress to enact whatever legislation it deems to be 'good and proper for America.' The proposed hate-crimes bill is simply beyond the powers that are delegated to Congress."

From a legal standpoint, such a federal law would be redundant, at best.

One can understand if the call for hate-crime statutes comes from evidence of bad enforcement of the laws already on the books. We know that, in the past, police and prosecutors have been willing to look the other way when victims came from disfavored groups.

But as senior editor Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine pointed out in a recent column, "Unlike the situation in the Jim Crow South, there is no evidence that state and local officials are ignoring bias-motivated crimes."

Indeed, as Lynch testified, "all of the violent acts that would be prohibited under the proposed bill are already crimes under state law." Referring to the murders of James Byrd in Texas and Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, he added, "The individuals responsible for those murders were quickly apprehended and prosecuted by state and local authorities. Those incidents do not show the necessity for congressional action; to the contrary, they show that federal legislation is unnecessary."

Philosophically, passing this law would be wrong because hate-crime laws, however well-intentioned, are feel-good statutes whose primary result is punishing thought, violating our freedoms of speech and of conscience.

Wayne Dynes, editor of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, has noted that hate-crime laws, to be just, must be content-neutral. Yet in judging individual cases, he said, we would have to "get into the question of whether some hate" -- his example was that directed at an evil dictator -- "is 'justified' and some is not." He concluded that hate-crime prosecutions "will be used to sanction certain belief systems -- systems which the enforcer would like, in some Orwellian fashion, to make unthinkable. This is not a proper use of law."

Hateful thoughts may be repugnant to us, but they are not crimes in themselves. And crimes that follow hateful thoughts -- whether vandalism, assault, or murder -- are already punishable by existing statutes.

Passing this bill would also be wrong because it suggests that crimes against some people are worse than crimes against others. Hate-crime laws set up certain privileged categories of people, defined by the groups to which they belong, and offers them unequal protection under the law.

Beyond this philosophical objection, however, federal hate-crime laws -- those on the books now, those proposed -- are outside the scope of the authority granted Congress by the Constitution. New laws of this type should be rejected; older laws should be repealed.