Ministers say hate crimes act could muzzle them
By Oren Dorell, USA TODAY
June 15, 2007

Minister Harry Jackson recalls being told about the black men who were lynched near his home in Florida in the 1950s and his family's flight to Ohio after a state trooper threatened his father at gunpoint for helping blacks register to vote.

"That was a real hate crime," Jackson says.

Crimes such as those spurred black ministers to join the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s, which led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Today, Jackson, pastor of the Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Md., leads a movement against what gay activists say is their civil rights act: the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007.

Jackson and more than 30 ministers say the law could prevent clergy from doing what their civil rights forebears did: preach against immoral acts. "We believe there is an anti-Christian muzzle-the-pastor kind of feeling behind this kind of law," Jackson says. "I need to be able to preach that adultery, fornication, straying from the way of the Lord is wrong." the rest