Just a few days before the National Equality March, the House voted 281 to 146 to approve the Matthew Shepard Act, which had been added to as an amendment to a defense bill.
The bill now goes to the Senate for a vote, where it does have the grudging support of some Republicans.
As Judy Shepard wrote in her book, one of the important things the Matthew Shepard Act would do would be to provide federal money to counties prosecuting or defending hate crimes which would prevent those counties from having to financially throttle struggling county-funded programs.
12. October 2009 at 4:27 pm
This vote by the House of Representatives is certainly good news, and we can be glad Republican opposition was insufficient to block this highly commendable step in the right direction. However, the fact that there were a sizable number of votes against this update of the legislation serves as a reminder that a large segment of society still regards gay men and women as second-class citizens – or worse. That is the salient point of my recently released biographical novel, Broken Saint. It is based on my forty-year friendship with a gay Mormon man, and chronicles his internal and external struggles as he battles for acceptance (of himself and by others, including co-religionists). More information is available at http://www.eloquentbooks.com/BrokenSaint.html or authorautobahn.webs.com/bookpeek.htm.
Mark Zamen, author