President Bush signed the Hate Crimes Statistics Act on Monday, marking the enactment of the second major anti-bias bill in two years.
“By collecting and publicizing this information, we can shore up our first line of defense against the erosion of civil rights by alerting the cops on the beat,” Bush said at a ceremony attended by 175 people in the Old Executive Office Building.
Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee, along with civil rights and homosexual rights groups, had strongly lobbied for the measure.
Religious groups had worked in 1988 for passage of the first hate crimes bill, which created federal penalties as high as $250,000 and 10-year jail sentence for religious vandalism.
The president promised to use the White House pulpit to “speak out against hate and discrimination everywhere it exists.”
Bush also announced that the Justice Department has set up a toll-free telephone number — (800) 347-HATE — for people to inform it of bias crimes.
“For America to continue to be a good place for any of us to live, it must be a good place for all of us to live,” Bush said.
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