Leahy's efforts finally bear fruit Obama signs hate crimes bill senator long advocated for
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By DANIEL BARLOW Vermont Press Bureau - Published: October 30, 2009
MONTPELIER – An 11-year odyssey for U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy ended Thursday when President Obama signed a federal hate crime bill into law.
The Vermont Democrat had vowed to see protections passed after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard.
Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, first sponsored a national hate crime bill after Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, was murdered in Wyoming, but it was rejected by the U.S. House.
Another attempt, one year later, came closer: Both chambers of Congress passed the bill, which expanded hate crime legislation to gays and lesbians and those who disabilities, but the measure was stripped out in conference committee.
On Thursday, 11 years later, Leahy stood by and watched as President Obama signed the bill into law.
"More than a decade after Sen. Kennedy began the effort to enact this legislation, we have finally acted to ensure that violence against members of any group because of who they are will not be tolerated," Leahy said Thursday. "It is one more step forward in protecting the civil rights of all Americans."
The new national law will mean little for Vermont. The state has had laws in place for nearly two decades that do exactly what the federal legislation will do.
"Vermont was ahead of the federal government in this area," said Robert Appel, the executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission. "The increased penalties for crimes against groups of people have been in place here for almost two decades."
And just as the shocking murder of a young gay man jolted Congress to action, the shocking beating of a gay man in Burlington in 1990 le d to the Vermont Legislature passing the hate crime law.
Roger Macomber was leaving a same-sex rights fundraiser at Pearls, a now defunct gay bar in Burlington, on Easter Sunday in 1990 when he was viciously beaten by another man who, according to news and police reports, went out looking for a gay man to attack.
"[I] went to Pearls, found a f-g and kicked the s — t out of him," Kevin Murray, the man arrested in the case, told police, according to an Out in the Mountains article.
Macomber was found by police a short time after the assault and spent weeks in the hospital. Articles from that era suggest that he would face a lifetime of brain damage and blindness from the assault. Murray was arrested that same evening as police found him walking home covered in the victim's blood.
"It was a vicious attack that shocked everyone," remembered Rep. Bill Lippert, D-Hinesburg, an openly gay lawmaker who, before he joined the Vermont House in the mid-1990s, lobbied for passage of the hate crime bill.
Vermonters rallied together after the assault. A rally at a Unitarian Church in Burlington drew 700 people, including several Vermont politicians who heard the cries for a state law enhancing the criminal penalties of assaults that are motivated by hate against specific classes of people.
But debate over the hate crime bill in the Vermont House – which occurred just weeks before the assault on Macomber – was difficult.
Many Republicans and some moderate and conservative Democrats opposed the bill. Groups opposing the legislation handed out masquerade masks at the Statehouse to drive home their position that the bill was simply a "mask" for same-sex rights.
Some credit a floor speech by then-Rep. Francis Brooks, D-Montpelier, for turning sentiment in the chamber in support of the bill, a suggestions\ that Brooks, now the Statehouse's sergeant-at-arms, shies away from.
Brooks, who is black, said the accusation that the hate crimes bill was really a gay rights bill in disguise threatened to doom its passage. When he spoke on the House floor, he said he told his colleagues about how discrimination, especially when it happens to someone very young, stays with them for a lifetime.
"We want to be a friendly state," Brooks said this week, remembering his speech. "I don't want anyone to come here and feel left out or isolated."
He ended his floor speech by quoting lines from the song, "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child" – a traditional black spiritual dating back to the slavery days of the late 1800s. Brooks said he learned the song as a young boy.
"No one in Vermont should feel like a motherless child," he said.
Observers say Brooks' speech changed the debate. One Republican state representative – who, just days earlier, speculated that the bill was for the "lezzies and the queers," had a change of heart and voted for it. Another opponent requested that Brooks' words be recorded on the House's official record.
After the savage beating in Burlington, the landscape changed as the hate crime bill – which had stalled in the Senate – began moving. Then-Gov. Madeleine Kunin, in a rare move, actually kicked off a public hearing on the bill by testifying in its favor. She also visited the Democratic caucus – another rare move – and urged members to support the legislation.
Kunin, who signed the bill into law in early May of 1990, said the Burlington assault was a factor in her added push for the legislation.
"That young man was almost beaten to death," Kunin said in an interview on Thursday. "I felt very strongly that we needed to do this, that we needed to have this law on the books."
Lippert said the hate crimes bill was considered to be of such high importance that it became law effective on its signing, as opposed to July 1, when most laws passed during a legislative session take effect.
Kunin said she always had faith that Vermonters would embrace the hate crimes bill.
"Vermont has always been a little bit ahead of the rest of the country and this was no different," she said. "We have a reputation for being open."
daniel.barlow@timesargus.com.
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