Don Wildmon, head Mullah at the American Family Association is absolutely terrified by hate crimes legislation but not for the reason that you think. In spite of all the falsehoods about criminalizing religious speech, the real agenda is to prevent anything that might "normalize" gay people. Anything that makes it more difficult to demonize gay people becomes a curse for people like Wildmon who makes a living by demonizing gay people. Having been passed by wide margins in the House, the hate crimes bill will be debated in the Senate as early as today. If it passes in the Senate, President Obama has said that he will sign it into law. Expect the vitriol to increase dramatically over the next few days. In an email, Wildmon claims:

Senate poised to give special protection status to pedophiles

The U.S. Senate is set to give legally protected status to pedophiles and 30 other sexual orientations. The Senate refused to define what is meant by sexual orientation in S. 909, the "Hate Crimes" bill. This means that the 30 different sexual orientations will be federally protected classes.

Utter nonsense. The APA defines "sexual orientation" as follows:

Sexual orientation refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes.

A sexual attraction to children is not a sexual orientation and clearly not the intent of the law. Ironically, under current law, religion (including Christianity) is a "protected class." The new bill simply adds sexual orientation and sexual identity to existing statutes.

More:

http://www.tips-q.com/899187-afas-don-wildmon-continues-lie-about-hate-crimes

Edge Boston Reports:

Right Dredges Deep, Claims Hate Crimes Bill ’Protects Pedophiles’
by Kilian Melloy
EDGE Staff Reporter
Wednesday May 6, 2009

Opponents of legal protections for GLBTs have often (and often successfully) sought to confuse gays with pedophiles in the mind of the public.

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the Rev. Pat Robertson, and others have resorted to that time-tested stratagem in their attempt to derail the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act, which is also known as the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act after a young gay man, Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and left to die outside of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.

Right-wing opponents of the measure have come up with a new moniker for the bill. They are now calling it the "Pedophile Protection Act," notes a May 4 item posted at anti-gay religious news site WorldNetDaily.

The WND item, in which an offer is embedded to send a "signed" letter "to all 100 senators" for the bargain price of only $10.95, claimed that the bill would extend legal protection to individuals suffering from mental illnesses, including "all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or ’paraphilias’ listed by the American Psychiatric Association."

The APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses in 1975. The APA defines "sexual orientation" as "refer[ing] to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions to men, women, or both sexes," according to text at the Web site.

The text at the site continues, "sexual orientation is usually discussed in terms of three categories: heterosexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of the other sex), gay/lesbian (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to members of one’s own sex), and bisexual (having emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to both men and women)," but that definition does not include fetishes or criminal behavior such as rape or child molestation.

Moreover, despite right-wing attempts to characterize homosexuality as a mental illness, the APA makes it clear that being gay is not considered a "paraphlia" or mental illness of any sort by the professional mental health community, with the site’s text reading, "lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are not disorders.

"Research has found no inherent association between any of these sexual orientations and psychopathology," the APA site continues.

"Both heterosexual behavior and homosexual behavior are normal aspects of human sexuality. Both have been documented in many different cultures and historical eras."

Th site’s text goes on to note, "Lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships are normal forms of human bonding. Therefore, these mainstream organizations long ago abandoned classifications of homosexuality as a mental disorder."

WorldNetDaily does not include mention of the APA’s definitions after citing the group’s inclusion of hundreds of known "paraphilias" in its professional literature, but the anti-gay site does go to claim that the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act "creates a special class for homosexuals and others with alternative sexual lifestyles and provides them protections against so-called ’hate.’"

The article also claims that the Act "specifically denies such protections to other targeted classes of citizens such as pastors, Christians, missionaries, veterans and the elderly."

Others have noted that the Act does not to "deny" rights to anybody, but simply add sexual orientation, as well as disability, to a list of federally protected demographics that are disproportionately targeted for hate crimes.