OpEd: Hope for Accountability
Originally published by the Albany Democrat-Herald on May 9, 2024.
In January 2005, I was an artilleryman in Iraq for its first free and fair elections after toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime.
I learned the hard way that democracy is not a spectator sport and that everyone should be active in politics. Our elected officials are not exempt, and if career politicians don’t believe in their own laws enough to ensure their enforcement, then they don’t deserve to be our legislators.
Since relocating to Oregon from Southern California last summer, I have been eager to engage with my local representatives. When I learned that a member of Oregon’s Congressional delegation was hosting a town hall in my home county of Benton, I saw it as an opportunity to raise a question about civil rights. At the federal level, civil rights encompass laws that prohibit discrimination and harassment in various aspects of life, including employment, education, and housing. These laws protect a diverse range of individuals and groups, including women, people of color, gender minorities, and families. There are also civil rights for the military community, including soldiers, veterans, and their dependents. Our Senators already know this, but I want to hear why they were tolerating the military community being denied the rights their service is supposed to secure.
Jeff Merkley and Ron Wydon were in Congress when the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) was debated in 2009. Bias-motivated crimes, also called “hate crimes,” require special legal status because they endanger the entire community to which a victim belongs. The HCPA was supposed to protect whole communities, not just individuals. On July 20th, Merkley and Wyden voted in favor of including a provision to extend hate crime protections to servicemembers and their families. The Justice Department reported about 7,000 bias incidents per year from 2010 to 2019, data that exclude anti-military bias incidents in that same time span, from an Ohio man who planned to stream himself beheading a soldier, spouse, and military child to the Wisconsin man who left voicemails with several service members threatening “to blow [their] brains out” because they took orders from the President. A military police officer in Hawaii received a similar voicemail from the same Wisconsin man but wrote it off because “we get [hate/bias motivated] cards and letters a lot, [which] sometimes have pictures.”
The sad reality is that military families are denied the full protection of HCPA, a civil right their service is supposed to secure. There are other civil rights for military families that are not being enforced, but those weren’t voted on by our Congressional Delegation only to sit on a shelf in the National Archives. Despite Jeff Merkley hosting his April 7th Benton County town hall on a military installation, he refused to take a question from the military community. If politicians vote to protect a community only to shrink from their responsibility by letting those protections wither on the vine, they do not deserve anyone’s vote. Certainly not from the community they let down. I hope no Oregonian falls through the cracks of our democracy, but if they do I hope there is more accountability from their representatives than Merkley has shown the military community.
