Gary Glenn, who heads the American Family
Association of Michigan, and Michigan pastors Levon Yuille, Rene B. Ouellette
and James Combs contended that the 2009 federal law violated the First
Amendment because it could subject them to prosecution for their
religious-based speech against homosexuality.
The ministers claimed that under the Matthew Shepard
and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act they would be subjected to
“increased government scrutiny, questioning, investigation, surveillance, and
intimidation on account of their strong, public opposition to homosexual
activism, the homosexual lifestyle and the homosexual agenda.”
In September 2010, U.S. District Judge Thomas L.
Ludington of the Eastern District of Michigan determined that the plaintiffs
lacked standing because they could not show that they faced a credible threat of
prosecution under the law.
The plaintiffs appealed to the 6th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals. On Aug. 2, a three-judge circuit panel affirmed the lower
court’s dismissal of the suit in Glenn v. Holder. The panel reasoned that the
federal hate-crimes act prohibited violent conduct, not speech.
“The Act does not prohibit Plaintiffs’ proposed
course of hateful speech,” Judge James S. Gwin wrote for the panel. “Plaintiffs
fail to satisfy their burden to show that their intended conduct creates a
credible threat of prosecution to themselves or anyone else that is concrete,
actual or imminent.”
Judge Jane B. Stranch wrote a separate concurring
opinion, arguing that the plaintiffs’ reliance on legislative history to show
possible prosecution was misplaced.
About the author: David L. Hudson Jr. is a scholar at the First Amendment Center.
This article was published by the First Amendment Center.
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