Politics & Power Quote by John Conyers

Conyers is doing something politicians rarely admit without hedging: naming moral regression as a contemporary fact, not a rhetorical talking point. The opening, "It is distressing to me", works as calibrated outrage. It signals emotion, but disciplined emotion, the kind that’s meant to confer credibility rather than heat. He positions himself less as a partisan combatant than as a custodian of a promise the country keeps breaking.

The sentence builds like a case file. First, the broad indictment: an "age" that still requires fighting for civil rights. Then he narrows the lens to a specific failure of accountability: a hate crime tied to sexual orientation that "can go unpunished". That phrase is doing heavy lifting. It isn’t only about individual perpetrators; it’s a critique of the machinery around them: police discretion, prosecutorial choices, evidentiary burdens, and gaps in hate-crime statutes. Conyers is pointing at the quiet ways a society can endorse violence without ever saying it approves.

The final clause raises the stakes from negligence to intent: discrimination not merely tolerated, but "being written into our laws". That’s the pivot from cultural prejudice to state power. It carries the subtext that the debate isn’t just about hearts and minds; it’s about which citizens the law decides to fully recognize. Coming from Conyers, a civil-rights veteran shaped by the post-1960s legislative battles and later fights over LGBTQ protections, the line reads as a warning: rights don’t only erode through backlash; they can be bureaucratized into permanence.