Twenty-five days after Urvashi Vaid stood up with her sign at the President's AIDS speech (Talk Is Cheap), the same White House held a ceremony her organization had worked toward for four years. She was not allowed to attend.
A first in federal law
On April 23, 1990, at 3:02 p.m., President George H. W. Bush signed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in Room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. The law told the Justice Department to collect data on crimes motivated by the victim's race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. It was the first federal law to name gay, lesbian, and bisexual people at all.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had pushed for it since 1986 as part of its work against anti-gay violence: until the law passed, no one in the federal government was counting these attacks. For the signing, the Task Force was invited to bring seven people. According to the Task Force, it was the first time openly gay and lesbian leaders had been invited to a White House bill signing.
One name rejected
Vaid, the Task Force's executive director, was on its list. According to the Task Force's press release that afternoon, she "was originally on the list but was rejected by the White House for her demonstration at a recent Bush AIDS speech."
The Task Force went ahead without her. It agreed to a future meeting between White House staff and Vaid, and it "assured the White House that we would continue to speak out on the AIDS issue." In the same release Vaid called the signing "a major advance for gay and lesbian political visibility and effectiveness." About 150 people attended the signing. The seven guests from the Task Force's list were Peri Jude Radecic, Kevin Berrill, Robert Bray, Claudia Brenner, Frank Ricchiazzi, an officer of a California gay Republican group, Art Schenck of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Susan Kaplan, an aide to Senator Paul Simon.
So in a single month, Vaid was both inside and outside the room. Her protest had been seen around the country; her seat at the table had been taken away.
The woman from the Appalachian Trail
One of the guests, Claudia Brenner, carried the reason for the law with her. In May 1988 she and her partner, Rebecca Wight, were camping in Michaux State Forest, along the Appalachian Trail in south-central Pennsylvania, when a man who had been watching them opened fire. Brenner was shot five times. Wight was too badly hurt to stand, so Brenner walked about four miles to a road and got a ride to the police station in Shippensburg. When the police reached the campsite, Wight was dead.
At his trial the gunman's lawyer claimed that the women's relationship had provoked him; the judge refused to let that argument into the trial. Brenner became a speaker against anti-gay violence and wrote a book about the attack, Eight Bullets.
What the law produced
The law worked. In December 1992 the FBI published its first report under it, Hate Crime Statistics, 1990: A Resource Book. It was prepared at Northeastern University in Boston, where Vaid had gone to law school, and it covered eleven states one by one: Connecticut, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Since then the FBI has published a hate-crime report every year. In 2009 Congress widened the law with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The White House's discomfort with the Task Force did not end in 1990. When President Bush's campaign chairman met Vaid and other gay leaders in 1992, Southern Baptist leaders wrote to the President that they had been told the 1990 invitations were the work of "a misguided, overeager staff member acting on her own." (The 1992 backlash.)
Sources
- Hate Crime Statistics Act, Public Law 101-275 (1990), now 28 U.S.C. § 534.
- President Bush, "Remarks on Signing the Hate Crime Statistics Act," April 23, 1990, Public Papers of the Presidents (Bush Library).
- National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, "President Bush Signs Hate Crimes Law; Event Marks Four-Year Anti-Violence Effort by Task Force as Gays Invited to White House," April 23, 1990 (UNT Digital Library). This release is the only source found so far for Vaid's exclusion.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Hate Crime Statistics, 1990: A Resource Book (1992) (National Archives).
- Southern Baptist Convention leaders to President Bush, February 19, 1992, in the Bush Library's speechwriting files (National Archives, NAID 323153921).
- Wikipedia, "Hate Crime Statistics Act" and "Murder of Rebecca Wight".
