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State Rep. Meagan Hanson (R-Brookhaven) announced Wednesday that she has pre-filed new hate crime legislation for the coming session of the Georgia General Assembly, which convenes next week.
Hanson held a press conference along with Allison Padilla-Goodman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, along with several law enforcement officials.
While Hanson said her bill’s final details are still being ironed out, she said the law is needed to combat “an increase in the resurgence of tribal-based animosities that are motivated solely by group relationships over the past year.
If this bill sounds vague, that's on purpose because any bill that specifically seeks to protect racial, ethnic and (ESPECIALLY) sexual/gender minorities in a governing body as deeply conservative as the Republican-dominated Georgia Legislature in a deeply conservative political climate as Georgia in the current political environment dominated by Trump movement conservatives will basically be dead on arrival before being filed.
Representative Hanson has to be vague and avoid language that will appear to be trying to provide special protections to racial/ethnic and sexual/gender minorities in the current political environment where there is even less of an appetite by conservatives to provide special legal protections to minority groups than before the Religious Liberty/Trump era.
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Originally Posted by atler8
Interesting, particularly in view of the following line taken from a WABE-FM story linked below the specific words.
As a Republican and a conservative, Hanson may have a couple of tweets on her account from 5 and 7 years ago that potentially could be considered negative about transgender people.
But as a relatively very young female member of a Georgia Legislature that is dominated by deeply conservative older men, Representative Hanson (who represents a traditionally center-right House district that has been trending increasingly moderate-to-progressive in recent years) is by far one of the more socially moderate and socially progressive members of an otherwise generally deeply-conservative Republican near-supermajority in the Georgia Legislature.
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Originally Posted by Forhall
Amazing that a Republican would ever do something pro-citizen, especially civil rights related. Maybe it's to help court Amazon?
With the increasingly moderate/progressive makeup of her district (Georgia House District 80 which includes all of trendy Brookhaven and part of Sandy Springs) and with her youthful age (Millennial in her 30's), it is not necessarily all surprising that a young female Republican like Meagan Hanson would push for state hate crimes legislation.
That is also a great assessment that Hanson's push for hate crimes legislation in Georgia could be to help court Amazon's second headquarters.
Having a young female Millennial member of the Republican near-supermajority like Meagan Hanson push for state hate crimes legislation can only help in the effort to attract Amazon's second HQ to a generally deeply socially and culturally conservative state like Georgia.
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Originally Posted by jero23
HIGHLY doubtful. This is some bs legislation that is going to be choke full of crap that want be as it is presented.
Don't be too down on this proposed hate crimes legislation.
I know that it is being put forward by a Republican member of a deeply-conservative governing entity in the Georgia Legislature, but just the fact that hate crimes legislation of any kind is being floated is a very big development (and very positive development for social and cultural progressives) that signifies that the political climate in Georgia is starting to move away from the hard-right towards the center-right/center of the political spectrum.
Before this point, the concept of state hate crimes legislation would have been considered unthinkable (and even patently offensive) in a deeply conservative Georgia statewide political climate that had moved very hard and somewhat far to the right since the last hate crimes legislation was passed into law by the Georgia Legislature's erstwhile Democratic majority back in the early 2000's (and that was subsequently struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court for being too vague back in 2004).
Though there theoretically potentially could be a chance that the bill could pass into law with a deal on passing a strong religious liberty bill into law, it should be recognized that the state hate crimes legislation that Representative Hanson will be filing in the upcoming legislative session still has virtually no chance of passing through a deeply-conservative Georgia Legislature (especially in the staunchly-conservative Georgia state Senate chamber) into law.
Republicans still make hold near-supermajorities in both chambers of the Georgia Legislature, there is absolutely no appetite by the GOP base for hate crimes legislation to pass through a governing body religious liberty or RFRA is much closer to passing into law than hate crimes bills and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston has no personal appetite to deal with divisive social and cultural issues in an election year when a very lucrative $5 billion, 50,000-job economic (and political) prize in the form of Amazon's second HQ is up for grabs.
But Rep. Hanson's filing of the bill is a critically-important first step in setting the stage for the passage of hate crimes legislation in the future (probably about 5-10 years down the line) when a potentially less deeply socially and culturally-conservative Georgia Legislature might be more receptive to passing hate crimes legislation, particularly in the name of attracting even more lucrative business to Georgia.
Hanson is not pro-LGBT. She is a GOP lackey, who is ultimately politically doomed in that district which will be blue soon.
She opposed the same thing last session, so, her proposing it this session clearly is a strategy move coming from state GOP leadership, not a sincere moral epiphany from her.
Hanson is not pro-LGBT. She is a GOP lackey, who is ultimately politically doomed in that district which will be blue soon.
She opposed the same thing last session, so, her proposing it this session clearly is a strategy move coming from state GOP leadership, not a sincere moral epiphany from her.
That more than likely may be the case that Hanson's announcement that she will introduce state-level hate crimes legislation in the upcoming session of the Georgia General Assembly is a strategic move by Georgia Legislative leadership to attempt to protect one of their most vulnerable members during a 2018 national mid-term election cycle that could be challenging for Republicans.
But even if this is much more of a cynical political move than an act of sincere moral conviction, this is still an overwhelmingly positive sign for moderates and progressives that the political climate is moving in a more positive direction away from the political hard-right and towards the center of the political spectrum.
For political moderates and progressives, this move should be interpreted as a sign of tremendous progress that the generally deeply-conservative Republican majority thinks that it is more advantageous to at least attempt to pander on a more progressive issue like state-level hate crimes legislation than on a deeply-conservative and less-inclusive issue like Religious Liberty.
It is definitely not perfect, but it is an indication of some meaningful progress in a positive direction that is being forced by such factors as a challenging national electoral environment for Republicans in 2018, Rep. Hanson's very vulnerable status in an ITP house district that is trending heavily towards the center and the left, and the effort to attract Amazon's second headquarters.
I know that it is not a perfect scenario or situation for social progressives for a member of the deeply-conservative Republican majority with what may be a somewhat questionable record on civil rights advocacy to introduce a state-level hate crimes bill.
But in a deeply-conservative Georgia statewide political climate that has tended to pander almost exclusively to hard-right social and cultural factors over the last 15+ years, progressives have to take whatever type of progress they can get and this is definitely a sign of progress politically, even it is probably much more of a cynical political play than a heartfelt personal conviction.
I'm not even sure philosophically if I support hate crime legislation, actually.
I don't see how it doesn't conflict with the First Amendment. Hate is a part of our freedom of speech, is it not? Making laws/punishment against hate/bigotry, is like thoughtcrime/1984 type stuff.
Sentencing should be up to a judge. It's totally fine for a murderer to get a worse sentence because they're a racist or a bigot, because the judge is trying to protect the community. That makes perfect sense.
What doesn't make sense is, hate by itself is not a crime, so but if you commit another crime with a motivation of hate, that's automatically a worse degree of crime, with different sentencing guidelines and minimums? Huh? The crime is the crime, not the thoughts that motivated it.
There should be flexibility at a judge's discretion to hand down more severe sentencing as it warrants on a case by case basis, of course. With bigots as a larger threat to a larger community. Of course. But that's already possible, without any new codified anti-hate. I'm not a fan of thought as crime on the books. What other thoughts are going to come next? Or what if good people rightfully hate bad things and bad people, etc? Is crime still 'hate crime' then?
Just not a fan of the whole thing, from a libertarian perspective. A crime is a crime, treat it as such, and give the judge maximum flexibility to figure out the punishment. No need for thoughts to come into the inherent severity of the inherent crime. It's just scary territory.
Hmm. If we include that the Constitution only provided/s protections for a community allowed to be citizens and that laws were adjudicated accordingly without a larger moral compass, I can see another reason to argue for the need of hate crime legislation. And if all crimes and the weight of their actions and judged consequences are not impartially handled, and are generally enacted within the deliberations of one judge in one space at one time, I could also see the need for hate crime legislation. It puts into legalese the lawful need to acknowledge perception as the motivation for whatever personal or property-related outcome. I'm understanding that hate crimes aren't written from the thought as the issue of criminality, but the thought that produces the action. Unfortunately the purview of bigot doesn't fully encompass the spectrum of targeted folk. Dylan Roof didn't shoot those black people because of their religious beliefs, etc.
Good people rightfully hating bad things and bad people? That's got me thinking. A simplistic (and so problematic) example: Fathers who kill their daughter's rapist are still convicted of murder. A liberal who punches a Nazi is still charged with assault and battery. Or could it ever even be as clear as "A good Christian killed a bad Jew"?
My fears with hate crime legislation is I hear it is notoriously difficult to prosecute in the US, partly because the US hasn't reconciled its gender/race/sexuality moral compass and absorbed it actively as a society. But then there's a place like Canada that still cannot prosecute 50% of their cases. It seems that successful cases function as big warning signs that government will actively try to protect people from a certain type of behavior - not thought.
I mean, I wonder further... we already have the CRA, which is not old in terms of law, and is unevenly implemented legislation. And that came not just for "treat others the way you wanted to be treated," but historical moments where the same crime by blacks carried harsher penalties than whites (eg Black Codes), to acknowledge that bias exists in judicial systems. But..... I'm not sure if there really is a way crime in general was ever equally standardized, except when racial and gender systems clearly did not overlap as they do today...
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Ga. lawmaker...
