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April 24, 2007
All hate crimes aren't created equal
Posted by: Chris
On Sunday I ran through the "gay angles" to the Virginia Tech shooting massacre, but I missed one caught by my blogging buddy over at G-A-Y.
He caught wind of an item on the Christian News Wire, buzzing with a press release by the Biblical Family Advocates, arguing that the campus shooting illustrated the “absurdity” of hate crimes legislation.
Of all the gay-related reactions to Virginia Tech, this was the most timely. Just two weeks earlier, Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) reintroduced a bill that would allow federal prosecution of hate crimes, including those based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Similar legislation had been introduced in the House two weeks earlier, and has passed one or the other houses of Congress numerous times over the years, but never made it to the president’s desk.
This year, the bill has renamed to honor Matthew Shepard, another college student struck down violently just as he began his adult life. But to hear the conservatives tell it, all violent crime is motivated by “hate,” so punishing some more than others is “hypocritical.”
“How can anyone say that it was not a hate crime for any of these [Virginia Tech] students or faculty to die the way they did?” asked Phil Magnan, director of Biblical Family Associates. “Where is their equal protection of the law? The fact remains that all crimes are a crime of hate.”
In fact, most violent crime among strangers is motivated by greed and indifference, not outright hate for the victims, but Magnan’s analysis isn’t only wrong there. Our laws regularly punish crimes differently based upon the intent of the perpetrator and the societal impact of the offense.
The U.S. federal sentencing guidelines, for example, allow for a more severe punishment if the criminal singled out the victim based on his or her old age or other frailty. The victim’s vulnerability makes the crime particularly heinous.
Civil rights laws similarly punish burning a cross in the lawn of an African-American family much more severely than burning some other object in the lawn of a family without regard to their race because the impact of the crime is much more severe. It’s intended to intimidate not just the black residents of that house but others in the area.
The same is true of hate crimes where the victims are selected based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Two years ago this weekend, during gay-friendly Amsterdam’s annual Queen’s Day festivities, my partner and I were walking hand in hand down a busy street.
A group of thugs spat on us and muttered an anti-gay obscenity, and when we didn’t flee, they attacked us, leaving me with a broken nose and two black eyes. No doubt there were other street scuffles during the course of that weekend, some perhaps resulting in more serious injuries. But the attack on us was intended to terrorize us, and others like us, from exercising the basic human freedom of walking down the street holding hands.
Consider for a moment if Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, had been Muslim, and his videotape message had said his attack was part of an anti-American jihad. The crime would no doubt taken on even greater significance, probably resulting in all sorts of anti-terror measures.
The motivation of the criminal matters, even if he’s acting on a hostility against gays that is a perversion of Christianity, in the same way terror attacks can be a perversion of Islam. Gordon Smith was right when he dismissed concerns that the Matthew Shepard Act would infringe on the free speech rights of those opposed to homosexuality on religious grounds.
"This act is about the prosecution of crime, not prohibition of speech," Smith told the Washington Post. "Unless they believe part of their religion is the practice of violence against others, they should not be affected by this bill."
What do you think? Take a moment to vote in the Vizu Poll to the right of this post. As usual, you don't leave the site to do it.
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Comments
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"Certain crimes are meant to intimidate more than the actual victim, and intimidate an entire community of people. Such crimes should carry a heavier sentence as provided by hate crime legislation."
No, they should carry the heavier sentence provided for crimes that are meant specifically as acts of terror, regardless of the victims -- terrorism. Or, if you prefer, premeditated murder and/or assault.
And I, for one, would have zero problem with the removal of all the other categories involved in "hate crimes". Let the law be applied equally regardless of the race, religion, national origin, gender, or whatnot of the victim.
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"Unless they believe part of their religion is the practice of violence against others, they should not be affected by this bill."
My exact thinking.
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Hate crimes laws are fundamentally flawed for a simple reason -- the outcome of a crime is the same, regardless of motivation.
If a man shoots you on the street, you're still shot. Whether he shot you because he didn't like your jacket, or because you're gay, doesn't really matter.
If such a thing happened to me, I'd want the man to get the same amount of time in prison (or other legal punishment) -- regardless of motivation. Ditto for other assaults.
Assault is assault. "Motivation" shouldn't be a factor -- the simple fact that the assault took place should be all that matters.
The *cultural* dialogue on the roots of violence is important, and taking action against anti-gay animus on that front is indeed important. However, mixing up cultural dialogue with legal sentencing guidelines is a recipe for disaster.
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"No, they should carry the heavier sentence provided for crimes that are meant specifically as acts of terror, regardless of the victims -- terrorism. Or, if you prefer, premeditated murder and/or assault."
That's exactly the point, NorthDallasThirty. Whether they're viewed as sentence enhancements or separate crimes, hate crime laws are much like anti-terror laws that recognize the same offense is more serious when the intent (and effect) is to strike fear into a larger group of people, whether it is Americans (terror laws), Christians (terror or bias crime laws), or gay people (bias crime laws).
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"Assault is assault. 'Motivation' shouldn't be a factor -- the simple fact that the assault took place should be all that matters."
If you really believe this, Brian, then your argument is with the fundamental structure of our entire criminal code.
Intent and motivation, whether based on level of premeditation or how a victim is targeted, form the basis for sentence enhancements and separate categories of crime throughout our legal system.
Your complaint would be stronger if you narrowed in on whether "bias" or "prejudice" against a group of people should be an aspect of intent or motivation to be criminalized. But as I outlined, that's what existing terror laws (favored by conservatives do), as do existing civil rights laws like those that make it a crime to burn crosses in front of the people's houses to intimidate them from exercise of their basic right to live where they choose.
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Whether you think it's hypocrisy or not, the voters think it is, hence the claim that we're advocating for "special rights." And that's what matters when we're trying to advocate for REAL equal rights such as marriage, adoption, immigration, and military service. I blogged about this last week over at www.outrightusa.org
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Chris, I'm so sorry as to what happened to you....I thought the picture was a fake...horrible.
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"If you really believe this, Brian, then your argument is with the fundamental structure of our entire criminal code."
I don't agree.
Our legal system today attacks premeditation, *not* motivation.
In other words, if you kill someone with *intent* to kill him, you get "murder one" when convicted.
Hate crimes are an entirely different affair. They don't examine intent -- they CLASSIFY it. So if you injure someone with intent to injure because you don't like his jacket, you get a lesser punishment than if you injure someone with intent to injure because of his sexual orientation.
The intent -- injury -- isn't punished. Rather, the *motivation* is.
That has very little basis in the core of our legal system and is, indeed, a radical and dangerous overhaul of the law that demotes the actual effect of violent crime in favor of a politically motivated judgment on the "motivation" for the crime.
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Another view, Bits clipped from the Colonel : < http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/dan/eddd070700.htm >
A form of tyranny over the mind of man that Thomas Jefferson feared has taken root in America under the guise of the politically correct war [i.e. - Cultural Marxism] on so-called prejudicially motivated acts of violence. In Washington, they call it Hate Crime, what it really is, is Thought Crime.
We all know some crimes are motivated purely out of hate for race, religion or national origin, and thus are somehow worse crimes than others that have the same result...
If Moe kills Larry during a fight and Moe calls Larry a black SOB during the murder, somehow that is worse than if Moe kills Curly and says nothing. The fact remains however both Curly and Larry are dead at the hands of Moe. Under the Hate Crime Law, the prosecution of Moe for Larry’s murder can be treated differently and the punishment much more severe than for Curly’s murder.The difference here, according to the federal government, is what was in the mind of Moe when he killed Larry. What Moe was thinking however can only be found within the personal depths of Moe’s mind and nowhere else. Murder is an overt act but hate, by its very nature, stems from thought…an internalized process. What is "hate crime" then if not the ability of the state to determine and then prosecute man based on his thoughts?
The government has determined that people’s thoughts now come under federal jurisdiction and we [the people] can be prosecuted more stringently for harboring what the government has determined to be unacceptable thinking while committing a crime. Hate crime is therefore thought crime and the instant we accept this legal premise as valid, we have opened the door to limitless interpretations and applications of that concept. And who determines what hateful thoughts are added to the politically incorrect list?—the federal government naturally and under the guise of compassion for minorities and the preservation of law and order!
Hate crime legislation has been cleverly sold to America by employing the time tested method of using a noble label to hide an underlying, more sinister intent. In this case, the ruse of upholding civil rights, punishment of bigotry, and discrimination was the noble banner displayed, but that was the deception designed to get buy-in from main street America in order to justify the existence of a law or any extension of that concept…and therein lies the more sinister intent and ultimate danger--the extension of that concept.
The power to prosecute is the power to control. If the government can prosecute a man differently for his supposed politically incorrect thoughts--incorrect as determined by the government--they have in reality been ascribed the authority and power to regulate and control the free thought of all Americans. In order for the government to prosecute a hate crime, it must first determine a person’s thoughts and have the authority to prosecute differently based on thoughts that have been determined to be offensive. When we can be prosecuted for the nature and content of our minds, we will have lost the liberty that is born of free thought and expression because there is no limitation as to what can be considered unacceptable. The ability to adjudicate and prosecute thought will lead to suppression of all free thought that doesn’t comply with the politically correct as determined by those in power at the time. This then is clearly a form of that tyranny over the mind referenced by Jefferson.I am truely sorry for your suffering an attack and the resulting pain and anguish. Truely..
The comments to this entry are closed.
Joseph Kowalski on Apr 24, 2007 8:32:33 PM:
I'd be interested in knowing how many of those opposed to including gay people in hate crimes legislation are also opposed to all the other categories which are already covered, including religion.
Certain crimes are meant to intimidate more than the actual victim, and intimidate an entire community of people. Such crimes should carry a heavier sentence as provided by hate crime legislation.
And even more importantly, hate crime laws allow for federal authorities to be called in to investigate the crime which might be overlooked by biased local authorities.