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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“Much of our poetry has the very best manners, but no character.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The sixties generation in the nineties: Falstaff crying, “They hate us youth.””
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature—were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“... 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)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear- headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)