Word: laws
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...would have been easier to just go along, as so many other judges did. But Wayne, who died Oct. 13 at 89, didn't wink at the law. After receiving handwritten letters from prison inmates describing awful conditions and brutal treatment, he appointed a lawyer to handle the case, a decision that led to an overhaul of the state's prisons. While most people in Texas were glad to use migrant laborers as indentured slaves, Wayne helped their children get an education in the state's public-school system...
Dees is the co-founder and chief counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center...
...Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, signed into law by President Obama on Oct. 28, represents both the best and the worst of the modern-day civil rights movement. Given the current legal framework, it was outrageous that crimes committed against individuals due to their sexual orientation were excluded from the roster of hate crimes. By correcting this injustice, the Shepard Act accomplished something important. However, the act also upholds and perpetuates the noxious notion that crimes ought to be weighted by the nebulous standard of “hate?...
...truly a paradox that those who clamor most ardently for the erasure of divisions between races also advocate most passionately for institutionalizing these divides by granting different groups different treatment under the law. They forget that law is supposed to be what unites a society, not cleaves...
Last week President Barack Obama signed into law a bill that expands federal hate-crime protection to include violent crimes committed on the basis of a victim’s sexual orientation. The definition of hate crime under existing legislation had only included crimes perpetrated because of a victim’s race, color, religion, or national origin. The passage of the hate-crimes law, named in honor of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student from Wyoming who was brutally murdered 11 years ago, was a long-overdue addition to a valuable set of protective laws...