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Yesterday, the Senate passed the Defense appropriations bill, and actually garnered some 28 "No" notes from Republicans who otherwise would normally be eager to jump on a defense-spending bill.

Their reason? Well, attached to the bill was the nation's first real federal hate-crime law. And that, it seems, was too much for them.

But then, that's par for the course for the modern Republican Party, which ever since the days of Nixon has come to represent the knuckle-dragging bloc of American culture, which resists efforts to expand and protect the civil rights of all Americans tooth and claw every step of the way -- mainly by appealing to people's irrational fears that granting civil rights to others erodes their own rights ... and usually conflating rights with privileges along the way.

With President Obama having promised to sign the bill into law, however, all this sound and fury has finally come to naught. And for that, it's worth standing back and appreciating what a historic moment it actually is.

The passage of the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act really is a momentous occasion: It marks the first time in history that Americans have collectively taken an effective stand against the thugs and bullies who have used violence through the course of our history to threaten and oppress whole populations of minorities.

Here's Brian Levin's summary at HuffPo:

The United States Senate passed landmark legislation today that expands the coverage and protection of federal hate crime laws to now include sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability. While a 1994 federal law technically covered gays, the scope of the law was so narrow that it was hardly ever used. Today’s legislation is expected to be signed by President Obama soon. It marks the first practical expansion of the most broadly applicable criminal civil rights law since 1968.

Moreover, as Joe Solomonese at the Human Rights Campaign observed, this law marks "our nation's first major piece of civil rights legislation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

It has been a long and arduous -- not to mention frustrating -- effort. I have been observing hate-crimes laws since their beginnings: my home state, Idaho, passed one of the nation's first bias-crime statutes in 1981, largely in response to the onset of crime associated with the Aryan Nations setting up shop in the Panhandle. (To the state's lasting shame, both of its senators voted against this bill.) My second book was an examination of the phenomenon of bias crimes and the enforcement of the laws dealing with them -- and all along, it has been clear that Congress needed to act.

What kept them, of course, was a Republican Party fully in the thrall of the Religious Right, which has fought any expansion of a federal bias-crime bill generally, while doing so under the rubric of opposing the "homosexual agenda." This bill had actually passed both houses of Congress three times previously, and was derailed each time by Republican machinations.

But that's only a small part of a much bigger picture. Passage of a federal bias-crime statute finally means that we have overcome our many previous failures to stand up to the perpetrators of terroristic crimes. Remember, if you will, how the Senate back in 2005 apologized for its failures to ever pass an anti-lynching statute back in the 1920 and 1930s, when lynching was a national problem -- even as it continued to fail to enact a law to combat the modern descendant of the lynch mob, namely, the multiple perpetrators of bias crimes.

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First Rep. Virginia Foxx called Matthew Shepard's murder a 'hoax'. Then, she turned around and issued a non-apology apology:

I am especially sorry if his grieving family was offended by my statement. I was referring to a 2004 ABC News 20/20 report on Mr. Shepard's death. ABC's 20/20 report questioned the motivation of those responsible for his death. Referencing this media account may have been a mistake, but it was a mistake based on what I believed were reliable accounts.

But it wasn't a reliable account -- a fact that is obviously not well enough known, but still isn't any kind of excuse for uttering that kind of smear. And that's the problem. She spread a lie, a harmful, ugly lie, about Matt Shepard on the floor of the Congress, and she has never made plain to the public that it was a lie.

So you can't really blame Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, for declining to accept: "She's apologizing for semantics."

Yesterday she tried again, and failed just as miserably to actually own up to the problem:

“In the heat of trying to handle the rule on the floor, anybody can use a bad choice of words. Saying that the event was a hoax was a poor choice of words,” Foxx said. “I’ve apologized for that. I never meant in any way to harm the family or offend the family or anybody else for that matter.”

“The term ‘hoax’ was a poor choice of words used in the discussion of the hate-crimes bill,” Foxx said in a statement. “Mr. Shepard’s death was nothing less than a tragedy, and those responsible for his death certainly deserved the punishment they received.”

As David Badash at the New Civil Rights Movement acutely observes:

Foxx’s newest “apology” demonstrates her lack of understanding of the basic issue confronting her: She lied about why Matthew Shepard was killed, and maligned the memory of a 21 year-old college student who, to the world, has become the face of a hate crime victim.

... One non-apology is bad, two demonstrates not only a lack of remorse or decency, but a total lack of understanding of the important and sensitive issues that confront our country.

You see, that ABC News report, by Elizabeth Vargas, was debunked at the time as a journalistic atrocity:

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Dusty at It's My Right To Be Left of Center has video of a Japanese journalist being killed in Burma. I had to look away. *link fixed

Buck Naked Politics spends a Sunday in the Park with George Bush.

Orcinus, Sisyphus Shrugged and Roger Ailes think that maybe Matthew Shepard has been bashed enough.

That old-time religion: Higgaion on a teacher fired for questioning Genesis and The Smirking Chimp on the Theology of the American Empire.

Circle Jerk in the Square reports on Bill O'Reilly's visit to a Chinatown restaurant.

Driftglass presents The Adventures of Sgt. Iraq.

This was the last Blog Round Up hosted by noted conservative blogger Jon Swift. Tomorrow Steve from The Opinion Mill is hosting. Send your tips to Steve at steve.theopinionmill [at] gmail [dot] com. I want to thank everyone here at Crooks & Liars for being such great hosts and all the readers and commenters, even the ones who mercilessly attacked me. In fact, I think I'll miss you most of all. Have a piece of schadenfreude pie on me. And thank you also to everyone who sent me tips and my apologies if I didn't get to yours. Whatever Atrios might think, your blogs don't suck.