7/5/99
ldlockman@telplus.net
If there were ever any doubt that Maine's media establishment does not employ a single investigative journalist worthy of the name, recent news reports about hate-crimes prosecutions should settle the matter once and for all. The work of BDN Statehouse reporter A. Jay Higgins, to cite just one egregious example, fails to meet even minimal standards of journalistic integrity.
Higgins' front-page puff piece, "A personal war on hate crimes" (BDN, 6/26/99), repeats the same old lies from the same old liars, all dressed up in touchy-feely rhetoric about "consciousness-raising," "tolerance," and "safeguarding human dignity."
The cold, hard reality is that the Attorney General's office, under the leadership of AG Andrew Ketterer and his deputy Steve Wessler, is consciously and deliberately lying about the incidence of hate crimes in Maine, and is working in concert with a statewide network of gay activists to fraudulently pump up the statistics. For some inexplicable reason, Higgins resolutely refused to do his homework on this issue, and instead produced a fawning piece of bum-kissing journalistic puffery that reads more like a press release from the AG's office than an honest examination of hate-crimes prosecutions.
When Drew Ketterer claims that 300 hate crimes are reported to his office annually, he is lying, and he knows he's lying. When A. Jay Higgins repeats this lie without checking the facts that are readily available to anyone who seeks them out, he is a willing accomplice in spreading the lie.
The truth is that there are consistently fewer than 100 hate crimes reported annually in Maine. Ketterer and Wessler have tripled that number by counting reports of "bias incidents" as hate crimes. But even by their own definition, "bias incidents" are not crimes at all, but merely "acts of bias that are not crimes." This elastic, easily-inflatable category (based on a circular definition) includes name-calling, graffiti, and even published letters-to-the-editor if such acts are deemed "hateful" by anonymous complainants. By erasing the bright line that distinguishes "hate crimes" from "bias incidents," the AG has opened up a loophole big enough to march an entire Gay Pride parade through.
Wessler has actively solicited from gay activists anonymous complaints of verbal harassment and graffiti, and then reported these unverified, unsubstantiated, non-criminal incidents to the public in the same statistical category as violent felonies. Ketterer and Wessler have repeatedly refused to break down the statistics into separate categories, which would enable the public to make an informed judgment about the frequency of hate crimes.
Gay Left political operatives have been more than happy to cooperate with the AG's campaign of hate-crimes fraud. Veteran homosexual activist Dave Garrity has used the Internet to encourage other activists in Maine to call the AG's office every time they hear an insult. As Garrity spelled it out, "Call even if you're not sure there's been a crime, they are keeping records of harassment, too. And these records may justify seeking further legal protections from the legislature. So everybody, call Augusta even if it wasn't much more than somebody yelling faggot or dyke out a car window at you."
When they call, the AG's office will log in their complaint as a "hate crime," and then run to the Legislature whining that we have an epidemic of hate-motivated violence against gays and lesbians that can only be halted by enactment of a "sexual orientation" amendment to the Maine Human Rights Act -- a legislative act that Maine voters vetoed in February of 1998.
This relentlessly dishonest campaign to inflate the hate-crimes statistics in Maine is a microcosm of the Gay Left's national strategy pursued since the dawn of the modern gay-rights movement in America: Falsely portray gays and lesbians as an oppressed and disadvantaged minority group entitled to the same legal status and benefits as truly disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and disabled minorities. Inasmuch as the entire movement is founded on a lie, its leaders (and their sycophants in the media) practice wholesale fraud and deception on a daily basis.
Minority status means that the government will go to bat for you -- taxpayers will bear the cost of lawsuits against individuals and businesses alleged to be guilty of discrimination. If you're not a member of a protected minority class, you have to bear the cost of your own civil suits against people accused of treating you unfairly.
Neither Congress nor the US Supreme Court has ever granted minority status (and all its benefits, including affirmative action, minority preferences, and employment quotas) based on "sexual orientation." Groups seeking minority status must convincingly demonstrate a history of economic disadvantage and political powerlessness. By any reasonable standard, homosexuals in America -- as an entire, averaged class -- are anything but disadvantaged. In fact, they are among the most affluent, politically powerful self-identified subgroups in the population.
When are we supposed to believe gay activists -- when they boast to corporate America and advertising executives that gays and lesbians are an affluent "motherlode of untapped sales," or when they whine that they are poor and oppressed and that everyone hates them?
The truth is that the Gay Left, and the gay population at large, have all the money and power they need to take care of their own problems, real or imagined, without soaking taxpayers for the cost of lawsuits, protective orders, and affirmative action. Allowing an affluent pseudo-minority to hijack these civil-rights benefits, and muscle their demands for special treatment past the needs of legitimate minorities, would be a vulgar miscarriage of justice.
Gay activist PACs rank in the top tenth of one percent in political fundraising. Let them set aside some of this pile of cash in a legal defense fund if they really believe that homosexuals in Maine are so downtrodden and oppressed that they can't afford the cost of legal injunctions against their alleged oppressors.
In the meantime, is it too much to ask that reporters report "just the facts," and refrain from promoting the transparently bogus and selfish special interests of a demonstrably dishonest pseudo-minority defined by nothing more than how its members claim to think about sex?Lawrence Lockman is chairman of Concerned Maine Families. CMF's citizen-initiated petition to ban same-sex marriages garnered over 60,000 signatures of Maine voters in 1996, and was enacted by veto-proof majorities in both houses of the Maine Legislature in 1997. It remains the only citizen-initiated ban in the USA.
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