Ten years ago this month, Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard was brutally attacked and murdered because he was gay. A year before Matthew's murder, James Byrd. Jr. was kidnapped, beaten, and stripped naked by three white supremacists, who chained him by the ankles to a pickup truck and dragged his body for three miles. These tragedies reawakened American consciousness about hate crime and sparked debate far beyond U.S. borders.

There's more...

Senator Kennedy's prolific career spanned nearly five decades, during which he authored more than 2,500 bills in the U.S. Senate. Several hundred have become public law. This fall we hope to add yet another bill to that distinguished list - the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

There's more...

The hateful murder of Special Police Officer Stephen Johns as he guarded the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was a troubling reminder that anti-Semitism still thrives in the United States. But the reminder should not stop there: Anti-Semitic and other violent hate crimes know no boundaries and are on the rise, from Washington to Europe and beyond.

There's more...

In 1998, the murder of Matthew Shepard sent shock waves through the nation. A 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming, Shepard was brutally beaten, tortured, tied to a fence, and left for dead. Eighteen hours later, a bicyclist found Matthew, initially thinking he was a scarecrow. He was rushed to the hospital and died five days later.  

Now, more than a decade later, the U.S. Senate is set to vote on a bill that would give the government additional tools to combat and prevent such heinous acts. This critical legislation, which has already passed in the House of Representatives in a bipartisan vote of 249-175, is aptly named the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act (S. 909). If passed into law, it could prove to be one of the nation's strongest weapons to date to protect those who are most vulnerable to bias-motivated violence.

There's more...