Excuse me for laughing, but the flawed logic of liberals has run into sort of a lesbian conundrum up in the blue-blue state of Massachusetts. Seems three women who proudly fly the rainbow flag were arraigned for beating up a gay man in a Massachusetts train station. All three ladies were charged with participating in a hate crime.
That's right -- three lesbians who happen to be black beat up on a gay guy in a train station and get arrested for being perpetrators of a "hate crime." The problem is that all four of the individuals involved -- the accused as well as the victim -- are homosexuals. So is it the first-ever gay-on-gay hate crime? Or is it a female-on-male hate crime? What about the race of the guy who was pounded by the trio -- if he's white, Asian or Latino, could it be considered liberals' perennial favorite, the "racially-motivated" hate crime?
Logically, it has to be one of the latter two because the law cannot prosecute a gay person beating up on another gay person as a hate crime. Unless of course the women are self-loathing lesbians and they thought he was a girl. Or maybe the guy about to board the train was wearing an Ellen DeGeneres T-shirt and the ladies were enraged by his outrageous attempt to co-opt their mascot, so they beat the daylights out of him.
Civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, referring to the "hate crime" aspect of the case, said "My guess is that no sane jury would convict them under those circumstances, but what this really demonstrates is the idiocy of the hate-crime legislation. If you beat someone up, you're guilty of assault and battery of a human being. Period. The idea of trying to break down human beings into categories is doomed to failure."
If the lesbian/gay hate-crime concept catches on, similar accusations could even make their way into bi-racial-versus-purebred territory. Heck, then both blacks and whites in America could accuse Barack Obama of targeting them racially, thanks to the policies and legislation that have all but bloodied the nose of every American.
Together with the Bay State ACLU, Massachusetts prosecutors maintain that "no matter the defendant's sexual orientation, they can still face the crime of assault and battery with intent to intimidate, which carries up to a 10-year prison sentence, by using hateful language."
Carolyn Euell, the 38-year-old mother of Erika and Felicia Stroud, maintains that the attack "can't be hateful" because both of her daughters are lesbians. Okay, so that means if the perpetrator is a lesbian and the victim is a gay male, or vice versa, then according to Mama Carolyn, "viciously beat[ing]" a person and "punching and kicking him" after being bumped on a stairwell with a backpack isn't considered a "hateful" thing at all; it's actually a typical response to particularly offensive fashion faux pas, and all but guarantees the offender won't repeat it.
The victim, who suffered a broken nose and may well have saved himself further injury by covering other body parts with the offending back pack, said he believed the attack was "motivated as a crime because of his sexual orientation." Let's face it -- like many straight women, lesbians are generally not fond of men, so it stands to reason that beating up on a man, gay or straight, could be viewed as a female-on-male hate crime.
Helene Tomlinson, attorney for third defendant Lydia Sanford, told the judge that Ms. Lydia is "openly identified as a lesbian ... so any homophobic (accusation) is unwarranted." She maintained that the gay guy with the backpack was the aggressor and it was he who used racial slurs. "He provoked them," Tomlinson said. Whoa, call in Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton, because now we're finally getting somewhere. The guy with the broken nose was not black.
Felicia Stroud's attorney, C. Harold Krasnow, maintains that the case against his client is weak. Krasnow said, "They [didn't] know what his sexual orientation [was], just like he [didn't] know what theirs [was]." Come on, people, that's like saying Carson Kressley could bump into the likes of Chaz Bono in a stairwell and they'd mistake each other for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gisele Bundchen.
A spokesman for District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said, "Prosecutors will have no problem proving the women committed a hate crime, even if they are lesbians." According to Conley, "The defendants' particular orientation or alleged orientations have no bearing on our ability to prosecute for allegedly targeting a person who they believe to be different from them," which now opens the door to a whole new world of category classification.
If lesbians assaulting gay men fit the criteria for a "different from them" motivation for a crime, then right-handed people beating up left-handed people could also be a defined as a hate crime. And so, in the end, it's not a conundrum after all - the case of Stroud, Stroud and Sanford versus the backpack-swishing gay guy with the broken nose is simply a new way for the left to accuse anyone and everyone of a hate crime.
Jeannie DeAngelis
Jeannie DeAngelis writes almost exclusively for American Thinker and has been published on the conservative website Pajamas Media, as well as hosting a blog. See Jeannie's Blog
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