PROVIDING FOR CONSIDERATION OF H.R. 1913, LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT HATE CRIMES PREVENTION ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - April 29, 2009)
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Mr. KING of Iowa. I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding the time.
Mr. Speaker, this issue was debated for 2 days before the Judiciary Committee. There were many, many amendments that were offered before the committee. Every one of them was rejected and shot down out of, I think, a desire to preserve the bill to be whatever it was that was presented to the committee.
And now here we are with a rule that results in a closed rule, Mr. Speaker, a closed rule because, as the gentlelady from North Carolina said, there is a fear that there could be amendments that would succeed that would be offered here.
One of those that I happened to have offered before the Judiciary Committee was to exempt pedophiles as a special protected status that is under this bill. Now, the rational thought on the other side I couldn't follow, Mr. Speaker, but I think it would be rational for this full body as a House of Representatives to make a decision on this. And I think that there was a fear on the part of the Rules Committee that that would also be a decision that would be made.
Well, I have before me a list from the American Psychological Association of the paraphilias, paraphilias being, I will call them proclivities in my vernacular, Mr. Speaker, and among them are pedophiles and a whole list of other kinds of activities. There are 547 of them altogether. We can't even exempt pedophiles, let alone the other proclivities that are there, from special protected status.
We can't define the language that's in the bill, the language in the bill that says ``gender'' versus ``sex.'' Gender isn't the same thing as using the word ``sex.'' Sex is what an individual can determine someone else to be. Gender is what a person thinks they are in their head. So the blurry language of gender replaces the clear language of sex that has been in our law for a long time in history.
Sexual orientation is another one of these. There are three different categories. We are figuring out what's in people's heads, the perpetrator and the victim. So under sexual orientation you have a mental definition, the head of, perhaps, the victim what's going on there. You have the plumbing of the victim, that's a different kind of a definition. And then you have the act that might be carried out by someone of a specific sexual orientation. No definition exists in law.
Gender identity is another broad category that can be whatever any individual wants it to be. So how does someone discriminate against someone else? How do they determine what these particular proclivities are, Mr. Speaker?
These are the broad, mushy areas of law that lead us down a path that ends up with any combination of liberal activist judges who will turn this into a mass of special protected status people, sacred cows walking through our society, self-alleged.
The gentleman from Florida mentioned the immutable characteristics. No, that's not in the bill. We tried to put it in the bill, but that amendment was shot down. I wish we could protect immutable characteristics. I think they should be. And those characteristics are those characteristics that are independently verified and can't be willfully changed.
That's the subject matter, 1984, George Orwell. I brought this up the last time we debated this. And I think it's important that we look at the book that was written in 1949 and predicted by George Orwell that by 1984 we would be where we are today in 2009.
He was writing about the new totalitarians who learned from the Nazis and the Russian Communists. And they said, ``The Party is not interested in any overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world.'' This is George Orwell, 1984, anticipating we would be having this debate in 1984, and today it's 2009, Mr. Speaker.
We should punish all perpetrators. There should be no special victims, and all perpetrators should be punished the same. And I think 25 years for assault on anyone is enough. But to the gentleman from Colorado that called for a life sentence for assault, what does he do to a murderer?
I oppose the rule and the bill.
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Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlelady from North Carolina for yielding.
I want to take it back to this question. We have these vague terms in this legislation that's before us, these vague terms that the Judiciary Committee majority refused to define and refused to allow a definition, and so I've looked up some definitions of this language, and here is one of them. Sexual orientation. We'll go to the Merriam Webster's Dictionary, under medical, and it says, sexual orientation: One's attraction to and preference in sexual partners. One definition.
Here's another definition that comes from the American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary. It says sexual orientation is sexual activity with people of the opposite sex, the same sex or both.
So one is an attraction definition, and the other one is an activity definition.
And now I go to the American Psychological Association, those people that have identified 547 different paraphilias, and they say sexual orientation is different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self-concept. Individuals may or may not express that in their behaviors.
So, here we have, again, these broad definitions in the so-called hate crimes legislation that truly are thought crimes, because without the thought, you're not going to have the hate, and it can only be defined by trying to look into the skull of the victim and the perpetrator. And there's never been legislation that's presented that's been this broad or that imagines that it can define something that is in the head of a victim and in the head of the perpetrator at the same time, let alone what might be in the head of the judge, Mr. Speaker. So I oppose this legislation.
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