A major landmark in the fight for Gay Rights

Officially signed by President Obama on the 22nd of October, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act provided some much needed and long awaited succor for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community at a time when hate crimes against it are unusually high. The bill addresses several much needed changes, many of which have been long in coming since the crimes from which the bill takes it’s name.

The Matthew Shepard Act, as it is more commonly known, received its official name from two particularly violent and brutal crimes with a hate based motivation. The first was the killing of Matthew Shepard, a 21 year old whose savage beating and subsequent death in 1998 brought national attention to the plight of the LGBT community, pushed by the efforts of his mother, Judy Shepard. The second was the murder of James Byrd Jr., a 49 year old Texan killed the same year, in a similar fashion.

The Act had been pending for approximately eight years prior to its successful legislation, having first been introduced in 2001 by Representative John Conyers, but died after failing to make it through committee; a fate it would suffer twice more in 2004 and 2005. It successfully passed the house in 2007, but failed in the Senate committee in April of 2007. Reintroduced as an amendment to the defense reauthorization bill in July of the same year, but was this time dropped due to pressure from then-President Bush, as well as Antiwar Democrats and conservative lobbying groups. It was reintroduced in 2009, when, after a protracted debate, it was successfully signed into effect.

Here are the changes that the Act institutes: it expands the 1969 federal hate crime law to include crimes based off of a person’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Removes the prerequisite that the victim had to have been engaged in a federally protected activity. It also expands the ability of federal authorities to engage in the investigation of potentially hate motivated crimes that local authorities choose not to pursue. The changes provides five million through the fiscal years of 2010-2012 to help state and local authorities investigate and prosecute hate crimes, and requires the FBI to track statistics on hate crimes against transgendered persons.

In fact, the act is the first extension of legal protections toward the transgendered community. It is hoped by many that these changes will help to prevent any more senseless tragedies like those witnessed in 1998, and in years both before and after