Michigan plaintiffs file suit against hate crimes law

The Thomas More Law Center, founded by Tom Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza fame, has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of several Michigan religious leaders against the federal government over the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which was passed into law last year.

The plaintiffs include Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association – Michigan; Levon Yuille, pastor of The Bible Church in Ypsilanti, Michigan; René B. Ouellette, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Bridgeport, Michigan; and James Combs, pastor of four different churches in the state. The full complaint can be read here (PDF).

Like the TMLC’s suit against the government over AIG offering sharia-compliant insurance, most of the complaint is devoted to political boilerplate rather than serious legal argument. An example:

Section 249(a)(2) of the Hate Crimes Act has the purpose and effect of deterring, inhibiting, and chilling the exercise of fundamental rights by persons, including Plaintiffs, who publicly oppose homosexual activism, the homosexual lifestyle, and the homosexual agenda, which seeks to normalize intrinsically disordered sexual behavior that is contrary to the moral law and harmful to the common good of society. Supporters of the homosexual agenda seek to demonize, vilify, and criminalize deeply held religious beliefs that are in opposition to their agenda.

That’s the kind of political rhetoric — as opposed to legal argument — that can really make a judge angry when they read a complaint. I spoke to two different constitutional law professors about this complaint and both said the same thing, that it would be unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss and very, very unlikely to survive a motion for summary judgment.

The first problem is standing. The law has never been applied to any of the plaintiffs, nor have any of them ever been threatened with such an application. The complaint seems to base its standing argument solely on the fact that some people have argued that there should be legal limits on anti-gay rhetoric, not on whether the text of the law itself actually imposes such limits.

The hate crimes law contains a rather explicit exemption which says:

Nothing in this division shall be construed to prohibit any constitutionally protected speech, expressive conduct or activities (regardless of whether compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief), including the exercise of religion protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States and peaceful picketing or demonstration.

There is no question that the expression of anti-gay views, whether religiously based or not, is protected by the First Amendment (as it should be). And in reality, the provisions of the hate crimes law only applies to the investigation and prosecution of actual physical crimes against individuals, not against speech. Unless the plaintiffs intend to actually assault someone, their anti-gay beliefs are irrelevant; if they chose to assault someone, then those expressed views could be used to establish that they committed such a crime out of hatred or bigotry and that might then trigger the provisions of the hate crimes bill. But the mere expression of anti-gay views cannot be punished under the hate crimes law unless the person expressing those views actually commits a violent crime of some sort.