Jane Folger of the ministry Faith 2 Action says the hate crimes bill passed by the House is aimed at pastors or anyone else who has the “audacity” to disagree with the homosexual agenda. “Mike is standing at a football bar, or he’s standing at a restaurant, watching a game,” she posits; “Bruce comes out of the restroom, and he’s touching up his makeup. He’s a cross-dresser with red nails and a five o’clock shadow. He comes out and hits on Mike. Maybe he puts his arm around him or maybe he brushes or puts his hand through his hair.

The average man would “maybe want to push off such unwelcome advances,” Folger observes. However, she warns, “That, if you touch him, is a hate crime.”

If you ever wondered why they call it homophobia, now you have an idea. What’s next, a congressional mailing of coloring books illustrating the horrors of marriage equality?

It’s beyond galling for those of us who actually believe in the First Amendment — even for hate speech — to hear it eulogized by those who gave up even their lip-service to it after 9/11, at about the same time that Ari Fleischer warned “watch what you do, watch what you say.”

Those in Congress who warn ominously of thought crimes had no trouble retroactively legalizing the administration’s illegal wholesale spying on Americans’ telephone conversations and emails — activities which are not exactly conducive to the free and open expression of thoughts. “If you haven’t done anything wrong,” Bush apologists blandly assert, “you have nothing to fear.” Free speech and privacy, as rights and goods in and of themselves, count as nothing.

How many Republicans who are now making impassioned arguments defending free speech came to the defense of the Dixie Chicks when their CDs were being pitched into bonfires and Clear Channel put them on a no-play list? How many work tirelessly to get “inappropriate” books off library shelves?

How many seconds pass before Bill O’Reilly tells an opponent to shut up and/or cuts her mic?

More importantly, how many movement conservatives protesting the new hate crime bill on free speech grounds heckled, harassed, and shouted down anyone who had the temerity to point out the administration’s transparent lies as we marched into Iraq? Free speech doesn’t mean much when you can’t be heard. Or seen — how many objected to the creation of “free speech zones” that pen peaceful demonstrators far from the person or place they’re protesting?

Far from believing in an equal, open exchange of ideas, the religious and political right believe very strongly that they have a lock on absolute truth; they disparage intellectual humility, tolerance, and evidence-based decision-making as “moral relativism.” These attitudes have eroded public support for all human rights, not just the right to free speech.

Most notable in that regard is the Bush administration’s notion of the unitary executive, which gives the president unprecedented power to declare citizens “enemy combatants” and strip them of all rights, including the right to physical safety—the ultimate penalty enhancement. During a recent debate among Republican presidential candidates, every one of them, with the honorable exception of Representative Ron Paul, eagerly endorsed the Guantanamo detention center and the torturing of suspects.

The audience’s thunderous applause was chilling. Cruelty has become anonymous, sanitized: respectable.

The other argument conservatives make against penalty enhancements is that they undermine the concept of equal protection under the law. According to this thinking, it would be un-American to add an additional terrorist penalty to the sentences of abortion clinic bombers, for example — and as far as I know, no pro-life murderers have had such a penalty added to their sentences.

Yet when Judge James Cohn handed down a five-year sentence for Stephen Jordi for attempted fire-bombing of a reproductive health clinic, he added, “I have grave concerns regarding the future dangerousness of Mr. Jordi.” The prosecution argued that the remorseless Jordi should be sentenced as a terrorist, which would have doubled his sentence, but Cohn argued that under the law domestic acts could not be considered terrorism.

Unfortunately, Cohn’s legal scruples have not prevented an Oregon judge from sentencing two eco-activists as terrorists recently. This is the natural outcome of an FBI decision to designate environmental and animal rights activists as the leading domestic terrorist threats, in spite of the fact that there has never been a life lost in any action taken by those groups. Unlike abortion clinic bombers, environmental and animal activists have made the preservation of human life a priority.

Yet there has been no outcry from conservatives against this dangerously broad use of penalty enhancements. As with their new-found passion for free speech, the right’s support for equal protection in sentencing seems partisan at best.

Which is not to say that hate speech is harmless. Far from it. Recently Eric Rudolph, who exploded a nail-packed bomb outside the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Alabama, made the news on this very subject. Rudolph made a deal to avoid the death penalty and is now using his constitutionally-protected free speech to taunt one of his victims, nurse Emily Lyons, from his prison cell. (Be forewarned, this link contains extremely disturbing photos showing what Emily, a mother of two, has suffered from Rudolph’s vicious attack, including the loss of one eye.)

On a website set up by an Army of God admirer, Rudolph

recalls how Emily Lyons, in court, described the pain of her injuries and made an obscene gesture at Rudolph as she showed off a finger mangled by the blast. Rudolph writes: “It was a great speech and one that the denizens of freedom should be proud to enshrine in a museum somewhere. Perhaps they could put it next to MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream.’ They could call it ‘I Have a Middle Finger.’”

An equal opportunity hater, Rudolph also bombed a gay bar.

Jeff Lyons, Emily’s husband, worries that Rudolph, who is considered a “Hero of God” among anti-abortion fanatics, might incite further violence from his jail cell. It is certainly possible. And yet there’s no way to constrain Eric Rudolph’s free speech rights without compromising free speech for everyone.

I believe it would be both wrong and futile to try to solve the problem of rising hate by curtailing speech. But it would also be wrong — and dangerous — not to address the problem at all. Adding time to the sentences of criminals convicted of violently assaulting strangers simply because they are gay, or black, or work in an abortion clinic, is an eminently reasonable way to discourage further violence against vulnerable minorities while at the same time protecting free speech rights.

In other words, I support this extension of hate crime coverage precisely because of the value I put on the First Amendment. Penalty enhancements allow us, as a society, to take a stand against radical intolerance at the point where vicious words escalate into beatings, cross-burnings, and bombings.

In the words of Dr. King, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

That’s the way it’s always been. Whenever some oppressed group manages to obtain a measure of equal justice under the law, the retrograde forces immediately go to work to limit the damage to entrenched privilege and, if possible, roll back the gains.

Consider the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to insure that black people would never be forced back into slavery.

The abolitionist and universal suffrage movements had worked hand in hand up to that point. But in a tactic that carries down to our own day, the amendment was interpreted as narrowly as possibly, extending (theoretical) voting rights to black males only and leaving black and white women to fight on into the next century.

Way back then, the Bible said the woman is subject to the man. The Bible’s still saying it, but in our day, thank god, it’s not also the law of the land.

It also says spare the rod and spoil the child. How far could a biblical patriarch go? Leviticus gives him authority to stone a kid who mouths off. Also illegal now, luckily for me.

These days the Bible says that lying with a man as with a woman is an abomination, a theme that is being taken up by some black preachers who declare that the Bible is the final word on the subject, case closed. Homosexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet we don’t hear anything from these preachers about all those passages, in both the Old and New Testaments — many more than those prohibiting gay sex — where slaves are ordered to obey their masters. No more slavery, but those passages are still in the unchanging, absolutely infallible, timeless Good Book.

The Bible is, among other things, a historical document that endorses slavery as an institution, just as it accepts the radical subjugation of women and children to men. Women and children were property, and biblical patriarchs could dispose of them any way they saw fit, up to and including putting them to death. But we only seem to notice those passages that have to do with preventing new groups from achieving equal status. Once the culture has assimilated the change, Bible passages arguing against equality become dormant for most people.

This selective biblical amnesia has prompted a gay man named Mitchell Gold to start a national campaign to educate people about the way the Bible has been used to support bigotry throughout history.

Although many churches are participating in Gold’s campaign, some black preachers see it as an unfair attempt to equalize the sufferings of blacks and gays. Consider this comment by the Reverend Keith Ratliff of the Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Ames, Iowa, where the campaign kicked off:

Even though there have been hate crimes against homosexuals, which is wrong, and discrimination against homosexuals, which is wrong, in my opinion the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement are not parallel.

Gays aren’t denied the right to vote. Gays were not considered to be three-fifths of a person. Gays did not suffer through Jim Crow, separate restrooms and water fountains, sitting in the back of the bus and segregated schools. Gays were not enslaved for more than 200 years in America, lynched and bombed by the thousands, like the black people were.

Reverend Ratliff apparently feels that the push for gay equality somehow takes away from the monumental struggle and achievements of the black civil rights movement, but nothing could be further from the truth — or further from the soul of the civil rights movement. It was Dr. King who said, “Injustice anywhere threatens the cause of justice everywhere.”

Rev. Ratliff would be better off if he stopped worrying about who’s suffered more — is that a contest anyone wants to win? — and concentrated instead on the fact that the same warped idea of equal protection is being used against both people of color and queers. This warping began almost as soon as the Fourteenth Amendment became law, when railroad robber barons were successful in using it to argue that corporations are legal persons, who therefore deserve all the constitutional rights belonging to living, breathing human beings, from free speech to equal protection — a ruling that’s helped make corporations first among equals for the past century and a half.

Because of that upside-down ruling, the amendment became a vehicle for protecting entrenched privilege rather than fulfilling its original intent of remedying injustice, and it’s still happening.

Conservatives on the Rehnquist Court used equal protection, of all things, to argue that counting votes in Florida in 2000 damaged George W. Bush’s interests. As for the interests of the thousands upon thousands of voters, many of them minorities, whose votes were tossed out like garbage, the Court said there is no constitutional mention of the individual vote. That’s just a custom.

In the same way, marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution is merely customary — it’s never needed to be written down. That’s why states are scrambling to amend their constitutions to explicitly confine marriage to one man and one woman. The difference is that arguing against voting rights, as the Court’s conservative majority did, benefits only the powerful few, while challenging the custom of exclusively heterosexual marriage legitimizes gay relationships that have always existed and are equally deserving of respect.

In fact, the institution of marriage has been evolving for hundreds and hundreds of years, away from the days when a father could sell his daughters and buy all the wives he could afford; when a husband could sign a recalcitrant wife over to an insane asylum just on his say-so; when a wife who left her husband for any reason lost all claim to her children; when married women could not own anything in their own right.

Within our own lifetimes, the birth control pill, legalized abortion, feminism, and no-fault divorce have moved the institution toward much greater equality. That’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s upsetting to some who have lived their lives according to the old rules of patriarchal marriage, where the father has more status and decision-making authority, if not intrinsic worth, than mother and children.

These traditionalists argue that same-sex marriages can never be equal to heterosexual marriage because only men and women can have children. Since people have children without marriage, and marriage without children, I would argue that what is and always has been of concern is establishing paternity.

Abortion and same-sex marriage present exactly the same threat to marriage understood as an institution for establishing paternity and passing on paternalistic values.

The Roberts Court’s recent upholding of a federal ban on late-term abortions without exceptions for the health of the mother — in contravention of settled precedent — confirms what many of us have long suspected: when it comes down to a choice between the actual life of the mother and the potential individuality of a fetus, the right wing chooses the proto-human fetus, hands down.

The reason is basic: the mother shares no genetic material with the father while the fetus shares half. In other words, the fetus is part of the father, but the mother is not.

So when social conservatives wail that gay marriage will destroy the institution, I guess I have to agree. Marriage equality really could go a long way toward dooming marriage as a patriarchal institution. The more images of legally-sanctioned equal relationships that we see in our society, the less attractive unequal relationships are likely to become.

We now have more media outlets than ever before, but their mission seems to be to drown out any molecule of truth. And our inter-dependent voting and justice systems have been reduced to slivers of their former selves.

For example, as time has gone by, the true significance of the Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush as president has become more and more painfully clear, in spite of efforts on the part of the media and across the political spectrum to obscure the bald truth: In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court shamelessly sided with a gang of Republican congressional aides swinging baseball bats who originally shut down the vote count and threw the case into the courts.

Jamin Raskin argued in March, 2001, in an article titled “Bandits in Black Robes,” that Bush v. Gore is easily the worst Supreme Court decision in history — even worse than Dred Scott, because in the case of Scott, justices could truthfully argue that the unamended 1857 (pre-Civil War) Constitution did regard black people as less than human. It was at least consistent. Not so with Bush v. Gore. Raskin says:

In a slapdash job of constitutional interpretation, the conservatives ravaged four foundational relationships in our constitutional system. It usurped the role of the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting state law. It usurped the role of the American people by halting the counting of ballots in a presidential election and effectively choosing the president for them. It usurped Congress’ powers to accept or reject the states’ electoral college votes. And it reversed the proper distribution of powers in federal government by having Supreme Court justices appoint the president rather than vice versa.

It’s important to remember that this was not a recount in the usual sense. Florida’s punch machines produced a number of so-called over-votes and under-votes. These were valid votes, but physical inspection of the ballot was necessary — and feasible. Often the voter’s intention was completely clear.

The media had already called the election in GWB’s favor, which no doubt gave the Florida GOP legislature, under Jeb Bush, the courage and ass-coverage to declare that they would send electors committed to George W. Bush, no matter what the outcome of the actual vote count.

Agreeing with Jeb and going even further, the Supreme Court used the opinion to remind the American people that the electorate does not really have a constitutional right to vote. The Constitution only mentions electors; the popular vote is just a custom.

Supreme Court justices appointing the president in defiance of the popular vote — in a total repudiation of the right to a popular vote — that’s about as activist as you can get. And we already have indications that Bush’s appointees to the Court are continuing in the same direction.

Starting off his tenure with the breathtaking gall that would soon become familiar, one of Bush’s first initiatives prescribed the remedy for his own theft of office: the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which required every state in the union to buy electronic vote machines — from highly partisan Republican vendors.

In spite of the crudeness of these power grabs, most of which took place right out in the open, it is only now that we can begin to see how it all came together. In an important article by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, “Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio’s 2004 Election Results,” we not only get more evidence that the GOP hacked electronic voting machines in Ohio in 2004, but we see how this links up with the firing of US District Attorneys:

There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio’s “official” Secretary of State website — which gave the world the presidential election results — was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Did you get that? The servers the White House used to carry on illegal e-mail correspondence with GOP Congress members about what they wanted from federal prosecutors — a wish list that included demands for prosecution of non-existent cases of voter identity theft and relief from the legitimate prosecution of Republicans — are the same servers that improperly hosted the 2004 Ohio election results.

Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio’s 2004 election while tinkering with the results.

I hope with all my heart that Congress heeds Rosenfeld and Fitrakis’s call for investigations into these servers.

It seems clear that as the electorate adapted and began to clean out partisan secretaries of state like Kenneth Blackwell, Karl Rove started maneuvering to put corrupt US district attorneys in place who would play a similar role in giving the GOP an illegal electoral edge.

It is very bitter to lose a tight election, particularly to right-wing authoritarians. But those of us who respect democracy tend to suck it up. We try, as the Honorable Justice Scalia suggested not too long ago, to “get over it.” We work to find a better candidate, we register new voters, we march. We even accept the winners’ right to select Supreme Court justices and appellate judges who will be around long after the victors are out of office.

But not when the “winners” never won. Not when the system is rigged. Not when the voting machines are sending data to the RNC to manipulate. Not when US attorneys are partisans.

Nor does the 2006 election prove that we’ve restored a meaningful connection between government and the will of the people. All it proves is that Democrats were able to overcome pervasive vote fraud with a sufficiently large national majority and a last-minute surge. That’s not exactly democracy.

Furthermore, accepting any electoral victory as our only redress for eight years of illegal leadership only legitimizes BushCo’s multiple, layered, ongoing crimes against the Constitution, humanity, and the planet we live on.

That’s why it isn’t enough for Democratic candidates simply to campaign for office; they have to lead. John Edwards has done that by refusing to debate at Fox-sponsored forums and by coming out against electronic touchscreen voting machines — the latter being of particular importance, given that congressional Dems still don’t understand the critical distinction between a paper trail and a paper ballot.

Mike Gravel did it in a recent debate by telling the truth about Iraq.

But most of all, Dennis Kucinich is giving the people a voice by submitting articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney.

The push for impeachment acknowledges two simple truths: we can’t wait for 2008, nor can we live with BushCo’s legacy. That is to say, we must not only remove GWB, but we must remove all the devices and stratagems his administration has used to subvert the Constitution including: signing statements and the concept of the unitary executive; the abrogation of the Geneva conventions, the concept of enemy combatants, extraordinary rendition, and Guantanamo; pre-emptive military attacks; warrantless spying on citizens; the unlabeled exchange of government propaganda for news; and much more.

These illegal maneuvers should not be available to future presidents of any party. Just as SCOTUS explicitly said that their ruling in Bush v. Gore could not be construed as a precedent, so the entire Bush presidency must be stripped of its power to set precedent — and nothing would go further toward that goal than impeachment.

Impeachment would also send a powerful warning to the Roberts’ Court that they, too, serve at the pleasure of the people.

Impeachment is the people’s powerful roar.