New legislation that just passed the the Michigan House of Representatives would strengthen current hate crime laws in the state and include speech that might cause "mental anguish."
Hurting people's feelings could soon be a criminal offense in Michigan.
The proposed legislation, HB 4474, would amend the state's Ethnic Intimidation Act of 1988 in order to consider it a hate crime if a person is accused of causing "severe mental anguish" to another individual by means of perceived verbal intimidation or harassment.
The amendment defines the words intimidate or harass as a "willful course of conduct, involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested…"
Acts of vandalism should, of course, be punished. But should they be extra punished because some bureaucrat in Lansing thinks it could hurt the feelings of someone in a "protected class"?
That's actually ridiculous.
The hysterics behind passing this bill are demonstrated by this Democrat's speech on the floor:
In remarks before the House floor Tuesday, bill sponsor Noah Arbit laid out his reasoning for proposing the legislation. "I'm sick of checking for hiding spots at the gay bar should a gunman opened fire. I'm sick of my Chaldean constituents being murdered in their place of business. I'm sick of reading headlines about Mosques and Churches being desecrated … Michigan can be so much better, and it's about time that we were," Arbit said.
He's afraid of mass shootings; therefore, make free speech illegal!
The problem, of course, is that this law is basically a blank slate that can be used by Whitmer and her cronies to persecute conservatives.
"Words are malleable," Attorney David Kallman of the Great Lakes Justice Center (GLJC), a non-profit legal organization dedicated to preserving liberty in America, told The Epoch Times. "They can be redefined by whoever is in power.
"Under the proposed statute, ‘intimidate and harass' can mean whatever the victim, or the authorities, want them to mean. The focus is on how the victim feels rather than on a clearly defined criminal act. This is a ridiculously vague and subjective standard," he said.
"The absence of intent makes no difference under this law. You are still guilty of the crime because the victim felt uncomfortable.
We all know how this bill is going to be applied.
Unfortunately, because Democrats have total control of Michigan's legislative and executive branches for the first time in nearly 40 years, this bill is expected to breeze through the state senate before it is signed by Fuhrer Gretchen Von Whitmer.
