The David Ray Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 (H.R. 254) or David's Law, was a bill first introduced in the United States House of Representatives on January 7, 2009, by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee of Texas. It was designed to reinforce enforcement of hate crimes, and specifically make sexual orientation a protected class alongside race and gender. It’s main purpose is to enhance Federal enforcement of hate crimes. The bill states that existing Federal law was inadequate to address violence motivated by race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, or disability of the victim. It calls for the revision of Section 245 of title 18 of the United States Code as well as the addition of a subsection outlining the punishment for anyone found guilty of a hate crime.
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“We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.”
—Man Ray (1890–1976)
“But I,
how I hate you for this,
how I despise and hate,
was my beauty so slight a gift,
so soon, so soon forgot?”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)