Congress Considers "End of Christian Witness" Legislation

"In Oakland, California, a handful of African-American Christian women found out that their free speech rights had effectively been outlawed. Their Christian witness was interpreted as 'hate.'

"'Hate crimes' bills inevitably create the 'thought police' by giving the federal government jurisdiction over local criminal offenses believed to be 'motivated by prejudice.'

"In Alberta, Canada, a former pastor and head of a Christian organization Stephen Boissoin, sent a letter to a local paper on the issue of sexual orientation. Two weeks later a gay teen was beaten up, and after years of litigation, the pastor was found guilty of violating a 'hate crimes' human rights law because the letter likely exposed gays to hatred and contempt - despite the fact that he had never advocated violence of any sort in his letter or otherwise.

"A judge in New York has ruled evidence of 'hatred' is unnecessary for a prosecutor to pursue a 'hate crimes' case against three men arrested for the death of a homosexual man. . . . concluding prosecutors only need to show that the man, who was beaten and then hit by a vehicle in a robbery attempt, was picked because of his sexual orientation.

"And while artists receive government funding for acclaimed exhibits of Jesus being defiled in urine, and by many other means . . . a 23-year-old man was arrested on hate-crime charges after he threw a Quran in a toilet at Pace University on two separate occasions."