Since the federal hate crimes bill (Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007) was introduced in March, anti-LGBT leaders of the religious right have been spending a lot of time and money spreading lies and misinformation about it, including that it punishes people’s “thoughts” and would lead to the imprisonment of evangelical Christians for sharing their beliefs about LGBT people.

For example, a social research analyst for Focus on the Family claimed [1] that “ultimately, it punishes those who hold politically incorrect thoughts and beliefs about homosexuality.” The Family Research Council has even created a slick online multimedia presentation [2] that warns about “so-called hate crimes laws, which are actually thought crimes laws, and Christians are the primary target.” Janet Folger, president of Faith2Action, has even directed, “Pastors: Act now or prepare for jail.”

Of course, we can always rely on the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) to provide the most egregious lies, including a recent action alert titled “Homosexual/Drag Queen Hate Crimes Bill On Fast Track,” which claimed that the hate crimes law would “fund anti-Christian curriculum for children K-12 through the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice to promote homosexuality and cross-dressing as normal behavior.” TVC also distributed a graphic depicting Jesus on a wanted poster “for violation of the proposed hate crimes law in his teaching and in his book ‘the Bible.’” (The action alert and the graphic have since “expired” and been removed from TVC’s Web site but have been preserved at Pam’s House Blend [3]).

Unfortunately, the religious right has been very successful at distributing lies about LGBT issues without being held accountable by the mainstream media. Let’s take a brief look at what the proposed hate crimes bill would actually do. For a more detailed analysis, the Library of Congress has a summary [4] written by the Congressional Research Service, the non-partisan, public policy research arm of the U.S. Congress.

In short, the bill authorizes the federal government, and directs federal grant money, to assist in the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes. It adds disability, sexual orientation, gender and gender identity to the list of categories under which a hate crime can be prosecuted for “willfully caus[ing] bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempt[ing] to cause bodily injury to any person.” The bill ends the requirement that victims of race-, religion- and national origin-based crimes must have been targeted because they were engaging in a federally protected right, such as voting or attending public school. And finally, it expands the data collection and reporting requirements of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act to include crimes motivated by bias against a victim’s gender or gender identity as well as hate crimes committed by and against juveniles.

Notice what the bill does not do — there is no provision for enhanced sentencing of someone convicted of a hate crime, and there is no provision that limits or criminalizes anyone’s thoughts or speech.

In fact, the House Judiciary Committee added even more First Amendment protections to the bill before it was passed out of committee, with a new provision specifically stating that “nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by the free speech or free exercise clauses of, the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In other words, not only is the bill limited to acts that willfully cause or attempt to willfully cause bodily injury, it also includes a provision that specifically reinforces the fact that it cannot be used to limit anyone’s, anti-LGBT speech, not even Rev. Lou Sheldon’s.

Despite the intentionally misleading messaging coming from the religious right about federal hate crimes legislation, if this bill passes pastors — and people of any faith, for that matter — will only need to “prepare for jail” if they are actively planning violent attacks against LGBT people.

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