Diane Vogel Ferri’s full-length poetry book is Everything is Rising (Luchador Press). Her latest novel is No Life But This: A Novel of Emily Warren Roebling (Atbosh Media) Her essays have been published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Scene Magazine, and Yellow Arrow Journal, among others. Her poems can be found in numerous journals such as Wend Poetry, Blue Heron Review, Rubbertop Review, and Poet Lore. Her previous publications are Liquid Rubies (poetry), The Volume of Our Incongruity (poetry), and The Desire Path (novel). She has done many poetry readings locally. Diane’s essay, “I Will Sing for You” was featured at the Cleveland Humanities Festival in 2018. A former teacher, she holds an M.Ed from Cleveland State University and is a founding member of Literary Cleveland. Her poem, For You, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of The Net 2023

Thursday, October 29, 2009

American Hate Crimes

This week Obama signed a federal law that makes it a crime to discriminate against gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual people. It is unbelievable to me that this is happening in 2009 - that before this week it was somehow okay to discriminate and commit crimes against some American citizens. This beats the fact that it took until 1990 to stop discriminating against disabled Americans as I wrote about in my last post. The federal hate-crimes law already covers race, religion and national origins. Yet, in the same morning paper that I read about the new federal hate-crimes law I read that Hispanics in our area are accusing the local police of harassment. So I have an idea - let's pass a law that makes it a crime to discriminate against ALL - what do you call them? Oh yes, HUMAN BEINGS, that's it - when will there be a law that bans the discrimination of human beings?

1 comment:

Daniel Bell said...

When law can heal the rifts in human hearts.