Yesterday, State Representative Josh Shapiro called for Bill DeWeese to resign his post as House majority leader. DeWeese presided over the Democratic Caucus during the period where 12 staffers, including his own chief of staff, were alleged to have used state taxpayer funds for political purposes. Shapiro called for this resignation in unusually blunt terms saying "We need leaders who are committed to transformational reform. We need a monumental shift, and we need it now. We can't do better, at least in our caucus, until we dedicate ourselves to a new direction."

As we've been talking about the past few days, portions of Pennsylvania's version of a hate crimes bill were overturned by the state Supreme Court.

The reason is basically rooted in the process by which the amendments to the bill--new protections on the basis of ancestry, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity--passed. They were grafted on to another bill with a different purpose, not that uncommon in the Harrisburg of midnight riders, or the plot of Legally Blonde 2, or any legislature, really.

So we need to pass these amendments again, in a new bill. JSPAN, a Jewish organization that does progressive legal advocacy, is urging such a bill be drafted and passed quickly. There are many many exhibits of why the law is needed, the awful killing of Luis Ramirez being only one.

I have reservations about how much hate crimes legislation can accomplish--as Helen's posting (linked above) shows, we need strong and unbiased policing and prosecution decisions at every level of government, not only increased penalties at the sentencing stage. But these laws identify and recognize the particular injury that exists when crimes are motivated by bias and that is a necessary good on its own.

If you care about this, please encourage your sympathetic legislators to co-sponsor or support a bill to restore the stripped provisions to the Ethnic Intimidation Act.

You can look up and fax or call your representatives through Hallwatch, here: http://www.hallwatch.org/elections/wardbook/repfinder.

Yesterday the Jewish Social Policy Action Network (JSPAN) called upon two leading members of the Pennsylvania Legislature to lead efforts to re-enact protections against ethnic intimidation that were struck down on technical grounds last week by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

A letter from JSPAN President Jeff Pasek urged State Senator Connie Williams and Deputy Speaker of the House Josh Shapiro to introduce legislation to amend the state crimes code to restore protections on the basis of ancestry, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity.

Those protections were added to the law in December of 2003, but the State Supreme Court ruled that the legislation was invalid because the final bill had strayed too far from its original purpose. According to JSPAN, the legislature can easily solve this problem by adopting a clean, single purpose bill to address the same issues that were contained in the earlier, procedurally flawed statute.

“We believe that all members of our commonwealth deserve to be protected from acts of criminal conduct directed to them because of their ancestry, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity,” wrote JSPAN President Jeff Pasek. In his letter he urged Senator Williams and Representative Shapiro to take the lead to secure passage of the legislation.

JSPAN is a not-for-profit, progressive action agency. It deals with a broad range of public policy issues such as aging, bioethics, children and youth, Constitutional liberties, criminal justice, education, First Amendment rights, gun violence, Israel, reproductive rights, and separation of church and state.

"