You Could Go to Jail for Hurting Someone's Feelings in Gretchen Whitmer's Michigan
Whoever said that words can’t hurt you has clearly never met the lawmakers from the Great Lakes State.
Because if that philosopher had met said lawmakers, he or she might rapidly change his or her tune because words in Michigan will soon, in fact, be able to hurt you — be it your wallet or via incarceration.
Michigan’s state House of Representatives just passed HB4474, a bit of legislation that seemingly overhauls all traditional notions of protected, free speech by aggressively broadening what “hate speech” can entail.
Under the new bill, which has not been signed into law yet, a person can be found as having committed a hate crime if they do something that “intimidates or harasses another individual; causes bodily injury or severe mental anguish to another individual; uses force or violence on another individual; damages, destroys, or defaces any real, personal, digital, or online property of another individual; or threatens, by word or act, to do any of the above-described actions, if the person, regardless of the existence of any other motivating factors, intentionally targets the individual or engages in the action based in whole or in part on any of the following actual or perceived characteristics of another individual.”
The bill then rattles off a number of characteristics that are to be safeguarded from verbal vitriol, and it notably includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity or expression.”
The bill also directly mentions transgenderism.
“‘Gender identity or expression’ means having or being perceived as having a gender-related self-identity or expression whether or not associated with an individual’s assigned sex at birth,” the bill states.
The bill also goes on to define “intimidate or harass” as “willful course of conduct involving repeated or continuing harassment of another individual that would cause a reasonable individual to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested and that actually causes the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested.”
If one is found in violation of using words that cause “the victim to feel terrorized,” the punishment is steep — certainly steeper than compared to, say, shoplifting.
If found guilty, a person will be charged with “a felony punishable by imprisonment for not more than 5 years, or by a fine of not more than $10,000.00, or both.”
Taking the various bits and piece of that verbiage, it’s easy to see why First Amendment enthusiasts are concerned about this drastic move from Michigan.
Proponents of the bill point to the specific “repeated or continuing” phrase in the bill as a way to quell fears of attacks on the First Amendment. No, you won’t (or shouldn’t, at least) go to jail or be fined five figures for getting someone’s gender wrong at first blush.
But “repeated and continuing” doesn’t account for something like this very distinct possibility: Will Michigan insist on jailing a pastor who refuses to recognize pronoun preferences on religious grounds?
Where does HB4474 end and religious freedom begin?
It’s an absolute legal and moral quagmire that is on the verge of being reality in Michigan.
After passing the House, the bill now goes the Michigan state Senate. Given that both of Michigan’s House and Senate are made of up of a majority of Democrats, the bill has a very good chance of ending up on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s desk.
Republican lawmakers have largely derided the bill.
“The state of Michigan is now explicitly allowing the gender delusion issue to be used as a ‘protected class.’ This opens up numerous issues when it comes to the courts and the continued weaponization of the system against conservatives,” state Rep. Angela Rigas said about the bill, per Fox News.
“Threats and violence and things of that nature and protecting against crime is certainly something that we absolutely should be doing in Michigan. But we shouldn’t be building that around an individual’s feelings of being frightened,” state Rep. Steve Carra told WWJ-TV.
Carra added: “Scrap this bill. This is not a bill that we need for the state of Michigan.”
Whitmer, herself an outspoken Democrat, will most likely sign the bill should it reach her desk.
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