The games Traditional Values Coalition plays

Guess what I received in my email this afternoon? I received an email from Rev Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition mailing list, wherein, they have an article entitled, “Pro-Homosexual/Drag Queen ‘Hate Crimes’ Bill Introduced“. In this article, the following claim is made:

Contrary to what John Conyers claims, there is no epidemic of hate against individuals because of their sexual orientation. FBI hate crime statistics from 2005 (the latest available) report only 1,171 cases of sexual orientation bias against individuals. Of those, 301 were listed as “intimidation,” which is name-calling. Another 333 were listed as “simple assault,” which is pushing or shoving. Only 177 were listed as aggravated assault against a person because of his sexual orientation.

All one has to do to prove to themselves (and others) that the Traditional Values Coalition is falsely informing their audience, through fact-omission as well as extremely careful choices in wording, is to do about 10 minutes of research.

First off, the article tells readers, twice, that the proposed bill is “H.R. 1592″. The problem with that is, according to a Google search, H.R. 1592 was a bill regarding establishing “marine and freshwater research, development, and demonstration programs to support efforts to prevent, control, and eradicate invasive species, as well as to educate citizens and stakeholders and restore ecosystems.” With enough spelunking, one can find a relevant link which identifies H.R. 1592 with the subject matter at hand. Only once is the actual name of the bill mentioned, “Local Law Enforcement Hate Crime Prevention Act.” While there is nothing ethically wrong with this, it can be very misleading and confusing to your readers. Confusing your audience is not necessarily the best way to get others to rally to your cause (although some prefer this method).

Second, in the excerpt above, the article “informs” readers that “simple assault” is classified as “pushing or shoving.” Since they are getting their facts and statistics from the FBI, it seems only fitting to use that same source to check these claims. According to the FBI, “simple assault” in 2005 (the same year the Coalition cited statistics from) was defined as (emphasis the FBI’s):

Other assaults (simple)
Assaults and attempted assaults which are not of an aggravated nature and do not result in serious injury to the victim. Stalking, intimidation, coercion, and hazing are included.

Source: FBI.gov: Offense Definitions

The Coalition declined to properly define “simple assault” as including stalking, coercion and hazing. As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, coercion is hardly something normal people would consider acceptable. These things are a far cry from “pushing or shoving.” Make no mistake about this: If you are unfortunate enough to be the victim of an unwarranted hazing, stalker or coercion, you will not be casually fluffing off the offense as mere “pushing or shoving.”

Next, we’ll look at the numbers cited. According to the FBI’s site there were 1,171 reported offenses of “sexual-orientation bias.” The Coalition’s article uses a strategic lack of emphasis and quite careful wordplay when listing the number of “simple assaults”, which I’ve already proven was weakly defined and explained to begin with, as 333. This means that approximately 28% of all reported sexually-oriented hate crimes in 2005 involved stalking, intimidation, coercion, and hazing. That’s a lot. If one of their loved ones were included in that number, they would surely be singing a different tune.

Again with a lack of emphasis, the article states that 301 of the 1,171 reported cases of “intimidation” were based on sexual-orientation bias. This means that 25% of these types of cases involved intimidation serious enough to report. Things along the lines of “If you don’t stop being gay, I will come into your house during the night and kill your whole family!”, “If you don’t stop being bi-sexual I will kill your dog and hang it from your front porch!”. As you can imagine, it would have to be pretty serious to file a police report and for the police to report that individual case to the FBI. As one can see by referring to Table 12 on the FBI’s web site, not every law enforcement agency reported their hate crime incidents. This may be because there were no reported hate crimes to those agencies, or, it may be because they simply declined to report the hate crime statistics they did have.

Thirdly, the article chooses to criticize only “Far left Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-MI)” yet makes no mention of the bills co-sponsors. Half of the bills 8 co-sponsors are Republicans, according to GovTrack.us:

• Rep. Mary Bono [R-CA]
• Rep. Mark Kirk [R-IL]
• Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen [R-FL]
• Rep. Christopher Shays [R-CT]

Ironic how an organization, with a track record of being highly critical primarily of non-Republican happenings in the US, which speaks “on behalf of over 43,000 churches” is critical only of a Democrat. To their credit, they did not impugn the four Democrats who co-sponsored the bill.

In any case, consider this just another attempt to do my part to encourage people to not believe everything they read, to do their own homework on issues and form their own opinion. Also, I’m not at all saying this is a perfect bill, or advocating others to support it. I just really don’t like it when an entity purposefully distorts things to convince others to side with them. If you have to do that to convince people to believe you, then you’ve got a very weak cause and justification to begin with.

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