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 worship not the Graces, nor the Parcæ, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“I hate your people that will sooner tolerate a soul than a gown that is awry, and will judge a man by his bow, his bearing, and his boots.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“... 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)
“When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)