Mathew Sheppard Hate Crimes Act

Background

Movies have been made about LGBT hate crimes that have happened in DOD and on its Federal property. Yet if you tried to find any statistics about these hate crimes from within the DOD it would be a dead end. Since these incidents are instead listed in very generic terms. This must end write your

Congressional Representative and Senators about this issue and request that the Department of Defense be forced to track in-house LGBT hate crimes for all its employees military and civilian. Remember every six hours in the United States a Hate Crime against an LGBT is happening and that is based on what is reported as a Hate Crime. Consider all the Hate Crimes that are never called Hate Crimes. Keeping that in perspective then you know the number must be worse.

Change

The Mathew Sheppard Hate Crimes Act requires any reported LGBT hate crime to be investigated and tracked. Even damaging property as a hate crime is if the alleged perpetrator is found guilty considered a felony not a misdemeanor.   

The U.S. House of Representatives debated expansion of hate crimes legislation on April 29, 2009. During the debate, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina called the "hate crime" labeling of Shepard's murder a "hoax". Shepard's mother was said to be in the House gallery when the congresswoman made this comment.  Foxx later called her comments "a poor choice of words" The House passed the act, designated H.R. 1913, by a vote of 249 to 175 The bill was introduced in the Senate on April 28 by Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, and a bipartisan coalition; it had 43 cosponsors as of June 17, 2009. The Matthew Shepard Act was adopted as an amendment to S.1390 by a vote of 63-28 on July 15, 2009. On October 22, 2009, the act was passed by the Senate by a vote of 68-29.President Obama signed the measure into law on October 28, 2009^.