Hate Crime: A Savage Hypocrisy

[Esper]

The only solution I can really advocate is better education and tolerance with regards to diversity issues such as the victims of hate crimes. I know that's a wishy-washy and horribly vague cop-out, but increasing the sentencing of already existing crimes doesn't seem like much of a deterrent.

Yes, a bit wishy-washy, but probably the only real solution in the long term.

As far as hate goes, I'd be open to an enhacement on a hateful act, just not a hateful motive. For example, if the defendant did soething additionally heinous like lynching a black person or sexually violating an LGBT person.

Based on your other responses I would have thought you would just call something like this a sexual assault and say something like "sexual assault is already a crime." I'm confused as to the reason why you would be open to calling something like this a hate crime. Is it because there is a clearer indication that it was hate motivated or something else?

I authored a bill that began lessons in LGBT issues on our campus, with an opt-out provision for conscientious objectors.

Am I being judgmental in feeling like it would be the people who object to these kinds of lessons who would be the ones more likely to commit hate crimes? I mean, it's not as useful to have programs like these if you don't make them mandatory.

 

[2Cool4Mewtwo]

I for one, am against any sort of crime, and hate crime is classified as a crime, so yes. (I'm not going to get too technical on this issue, by the way. What's wrong is wrong.)

 

[FreakyLocz14]

Yes, a bit wishy-washy, but probably the only real solution in the long term.


Based on your other responses I would have thought you would just call something like this a sexual assault and say something like "sexual assault is already a crime." I'm confused as to the reason why you would be open to calling something like this a hate crime. Is it because there is a clearer indication that it was hate motivated or something else?


Am I being judgmental in feeling like it would be the people who object to these kinds of lessons who would be the ones more likely to commit hate crimes? I mean, it's not as useful to have programs like these if you don't make them mandatory.

It's not a hate crime per se, but an enhancement because their crime was especially more heinous, violent, and degraded.

Well, a Democrat member of the House authored the original bill, which failed to pass the Repiblican-controlled Senate with all Republicans, including myself, voting Nay, along with two Democrats. The version with the opt-out provision garnered 4 Republican Aye votes, and one of the aforementioned 2 Democrats voted in favor. The 1 Democrat who always votes against LGBT interets represent Muslim students, btw. I have a 97% liberal votong record on LGBT issues, and that Nay vote is what deducted 3%. It's also the only area that I have a liberal voting record above 10%.

 

[Alley Cat]

As Freaky said, hate crimes only instill more hate. But, it is within that person's right to hate. Just because you do not agree with their hate, that does make it any less valid. All these hate crime laws do is objectify race/creed/orientation. In a hate free world, something as trivial as the aforementioned wouldn't even be considered in the sentencing of a crime.

@Scarf: I do not think that just because they objected to hearing about LGBT issues would make them more prone to committing a hate crime. Just because the hate/dislike the LGBT "lifestyle" DOES NOT mean that they wish to bring harm to a LGBT individual. Imagine a John Doe that hates gays, but he is a very peaceable person, and would NEVER EVER hurt another human being physically/emotionally/mentally. Now say we have a Jane Doe that hates gays, and is VERY aggressive. Say Jane Doe get's the brilliant idea to attack a gay man/woman. She get's arrested and charged for assault AND hate crime. But wait, John Doe hates gay people just as much Jane Doe does, shouldn't he be charged with a hate crime too? Essentially, they are just charging Jane Doe with an extra charge for the SAME thing that John Doe did. Now, of course Jane Doe was charged because she assaulted someone. But she should be charged for doing just that, assaulting someone. Not for having an opinion or belief that is "immoral" by legal standards

 

[Dawn]

You aren't entitled to an opinion when you kill/hurt/maim others based on their skin color or creed.

So if someone decides they hate old white straight men and goes out and kills one they'll be charged with a hate crime? =D

No. They won't. Hate crimes exist purely to convict people that commit crimes against minorities without the normal due process of law. =|

Being charged with a hate crime is as simple as having an opinion against a minority and committing a crime against that minority regardless of intent.

We'd all better support the popular opinion, if we know what's good for us. >=/

Drama aside, we /are/ entitled to our opinions. These laws are an abomination of the legal system that infringe on what /should/ be covered under free speech with a purpose that blatantly interferes with the execution of due process of law. Not only do they make punishments for these people harsher, but they make it a lot easier to convict said person than if they were given a normal fair trial.

The mere fact that you can get locked up easier and with a more harsh sentence for doing the exact same crime to a homosexual or black person is a contradiction of equality at best. If we want to punish the people that hurt minorities more, we should punish /everyone/ more. Instead we're just instilling more reverse racism and heterophobia into our very courtrooms in an attempt to try to /force/ people to be more like our view of perfection.

 

[Oryx]

@Scarf: I do not think that just because they objected to hearing about LGBT issues would make them more prone to committing a hate crime. Just because the hate/dislike the LGBT "lifestyle" DOES NOT mean that they wish to bring harm to a LGBT individual. Imagine a John Doe that hates gays, but he is a very peaceable person, and would NEVER EVER hurt another human being physically/emotionally/mentally. Now say we have a Jane Doe that hates gays, and is VERY aggressive. Say Jane Doe get's the brilliant idea to attack a gay man/woman. She get's arrested and charged for assault AND hate crime. But wait, John Doe hates gay people just as much Jane Doe does, shouldn't he be charged with a hate crime too? Essentially, they are just charging Jane Doe with an extra charge for the SAME thing that John Doe did. Now, of course Jane Doe was charged because she assaulted someone. But she should be charged for doing just that, assaulting someone. Not for having an opinion or belief that is "immoral" by legal standards

I think what she meant by that is that if you're going to commit a hate crime, you would most likely opt-out of the lessons. I think there are very few people who hate LGBT people enough to commit a hate crime that would willingly sit through a class about LGBT tolerance.

 

[FreakyLocz14]

So if someone decides they hate old white straight men and goes out and kills one they'll be charged with a hate crime? =D

No. They won't. Hate crimes exist purely to convict people that commit crimes against minorities without the normal due process of law. =|

Being charged with a hate crime is as simple as having an opinion against a minority and committing a crime against that minority regardless of intent.

We'd all better support the popular opinion, if we know what's good for us. >=/

Drama aside, we /are/ entitled to our opinions. These laws are an abomination of the legal system that infringe on what /should/ be covered under free speech with a purpose that blatantly interferes with the execution of due process of law. Not only do they make punishments for these people harsher, but they make it a lot easier to convict said person than if they were given a normal fair trial.

The mere fact that you can get locked up easier and with a more harsh sentence for doing the exact same crime to a homosexual or black person is a contradiction of equality at best. If we want to punish the people that hurt minorities more, we should punish /everyone/ more. Instead we're just instilling more reverse racism and heterophobia into our very courtrooms in an attempt to try to /force/ people to be more like our view of perfection.

This.

These laws pretty much say to victims that you're less important and deserve less justice because you're a white heterosexual.

Regarding my opt-out provision, aside from the fact that it was the only way the bill could have passed, I am one that is almost always against making anything mandatory. I believe in the liberty to make your own decisions.

 

[Livewire]

So if someone decides they hate old white straight men and goes out and kills one they'll be charged with a hate crime? =D

No. They won't. Hate crimes exist purely to convict people that commit crimes against minorities without the normal due process of law. =|

Being charged with a hate crime is as simple as having an opinion against a minority and committing a crime against that minority regardless of intent.

We'd all better support the popular opinion, if we know what's good for us. >=/

Drama aside, we /are/ entitled to our opinions. These laws are an abomination of the legal system that infringe on what /should/ be covered under free speech with a purpose that blatantly interferes with the execution of due process of law. Not only do they make punishments for these people harsher, but they make it a lot easier to convict said person than if they were given a normal fair trial.

The mere fact that you can get locked up easier and with a more harsh sentence for doing the exact same crime to a homosexual or black person is a contradiction of equality at best. If we want to punish the people that hurt minorities more, we should punish /everyone/ more. Instead we're just instilling more reverse racism and heterophobia into our very courtrooms in an attempt to try to /force/ people to be more like our view of perfection.

Don't assume because the news doesn't cover it, it doesn't happen. People are pretty good at hating other people.

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Upset about a racial name-calling that occurred earlier that night, several black men savagely beat a random white man who had had nothing to do with the incident. He slipped away from his attackers, but they forced him to swim into a lake to escape. He drowned. The three men were sentenced to less than a year in jail.3
• Massachusetts. Four black men decided to murder the next white person they saw. That unlucky soul was a college student from Boston, whom the men stabbed to death.4
• Indiana. A black man was arrested for killing seven white people with a shotgun. He explained that he murdered his victims due to his "deep-rooted hatred" of white people.5
• Miami, Florida. The leader of a black supremacist sect (i.e., the "Yaweh ben Yaweh cult") was convicted of the murders of several white people. He ordered his followers to kill any and all "white devils." They killed at least seven white people, bringing back body parts to their leader.6
• North Carolina. Seven black men kidnapped a white woman, raped her, put her in a tub of bleach, shot her five times, and dumped her body. The murderers said they did this for racial reasons.7
• North Carolina. Four black teenagers lured a white, ten-year-old girl into an empty house. "There, they sodomized her, strangled her with a cable wire, and beat her to death with a board. In the past few weeks, the trials in the Tiffany Long case have received extensive coverage in the North Carolina press. But with two of the three defendants already sentenced to lifelong prison terms, and the third now standing trial, the national media have all but ignored the story. Only the Associated Press has reported on the trials, in a single, cursory piece. The AP, of course, failed to mention the race of the people involved — an oversight it seldom if ever committed in the case of Amadou Diallo."8
• Boulder, Colorado. After discovering that one of their members had never had intercourse with a white woman, an Asian gang went looking for one. When they found a white University of Colorado student, the six men gang raped her in their minivan for two hours. At their trial, "Detectives described the woman's night of terror, including repeated threats to kill her.
  "The woman leaped out of the minivan after one of the men raped her. Naked, she sprinted across Lefthand Canyon Road before Steve Yang tackled her, authorities said.
  "'They were all screaming at her, calling her names and hitting her,' Detective Jane Harmer testified.
  "Yang put her in a headlock and dragged her back into the van, where she was raped repeatedly, Harmer said.
  "'It was a free-for-all,' Harmer testified.
  "One man threatened to 'cut and burn her,' and another put a gun barrel to the back of her head when they released her, Harmer said."9
• Kansas City, Missouri. An Ethiopian immigrant shot two white coworkers — killing one and critically injuring the other — at his workplace, then turned the gun on himself. At his residence, police found a three-page, signed note he had written in which he railed at "black blood sucker supreme white people" for oppressing him and black people in general.10
• New York City. In a Midtown office building, a white woman was assaulted, raped, and anally raped by a black man who called her racist names during the attack. Police refused to label it a hate crime.11
• Alexandria, Virginia. A black man walking through a neighborhood went over to a white eight-year-old boy playing in his great-grandparents' front yard and slit the child's throat, killing him. A witness says that the attacker shouted racial epithets during the attack, and the main suspect in the case owns anti-white hate literature and had written a note about killing white children. He had been previously arrested for attacking an unarmed white stranger with a hammer. (During the attack, he called his victim "Whitey.")12 This particular case provides a perfect example of the terrible way that anti-white hate crimes are handled. First, the investigators decided not to tell police officers about the racial aspects of the case, even while the police were conducting a manhunt to find the boy's killer. When this was revealed by the Washington Post, city council member Joyce Woodson defended this withholding of information from the cops on the front line. "What they did was proper. We already live in a racially charged world." The Democratic mayor of Alexandria implied his agreement: "Efforts to sensationalize this investigation will only hurt this investigation."13
  To make things even stranger, the FBI offered to send agents and a fugitive task force to help with the manhunt, but the local police rejected the offer. They also refused the help of the FBI's profilers, forensics experts, and others.14
  Eventually, the police arrested a suspect who was reportedly tied to the scene by DNA evidence. In another bizarre move, the Justice Department — which had acknowledged that it was monitoring the case — declined to prosecute the killing as a hate crime. The government's prosecutor in the case cannot charge the victim with a hate crime. "There's no applicable hate crimes law in Virginia," he explained.15
• An editorial in the Washington Times pointedly commented on the deafening silence surrounding the brutal child-murder: "Has anyone seen Jesse Jackson around lately? Kweisi Mfume? Al Sharpton? For persons whose political antennae are ordinarily so sensitive that they can pick up racial tremors a thousand miles away, they seem to have overlooked a possible hate crime right here in the vicinity of the nation's capital."
• Even though all of the above incidents occurred in the last ten years, anti-white hate crimes are not new. The Village Voice writes of "the wave of random street killings that terrorized San Francisco in 1973. The 'Zebra killers' struck without warning, murdering whites at night. Most victims were shot. One was raped, another beheaded. Four young black Muslims were arrested in 1974 and charged with 14 murders, seven assaults, one rape, and an attempted kidnapping. The Zebra killers were convicted in 1976."16

Citations at the bottom. There's more where this came from, btw.

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/hatecrimes.html

 

[Esper]

As Freaky said, hate crimes only instill more hate. But, it is within that person's right to hate. Just because you do not agree with their hate, that does make it any less valid. All these hate crime laws do is objectify race/creed/orientation. In a hate free world, something as trivial as the aforementioned wouldn't even be considered in the sentencing of a crime.

@Scarf: I do not think that just because they objected to hearing about LGBT issues would make them more prone to committing a hate crime. Just because the hate/dislike the LGBT "lifestyle" DOES NOT mean that they wish to bring harm to a LGBT individual. Imagine a John Doe that hates gays, but he is a very peaceable person, and would NEVER EVER hurt another human being physically/emotionally/mentally. Now say we have a Jane Doe that hates gays, and is VERY aggressive. Say Jane Doe get's the brilliant idea to attack a gay man/woman. She get's arrested and charged for assault AND hate crime. But wait, John Doe hates gay people just as much Jane Doe does, shouldn't he be charged with a hate crime too? Essentially, they are just charging Jane Doe with an extra charge for the SAME thing that John Doe did. Now, of course Jane Doe was charged because she assaulted someone. But she should be charged for doing just that, assaulting someone. Not for having an opinion or belief that is "immoral" by legal standards

What I was trying to say is that I had the feeling that people who already have something against queer people are going to be more likely to attack specifically queer people (if they attack anyone at all, which the overwhelming majority won't) and that they'll be the people most in need of learning a bit of tolerance while also being the ones most likely to opt out if there is the option of doing so.

Let me give another example to add to your hypothetical comparison. Joe Doe is not an aggressive person, but he hates queer people and gets the idea to attack a queer person. He gets arrested and charged with a hate crime. He wouldn't have attacked anyone if he weren't so hateful so it's his hatred which is at fault.

Essentially, hate crimes laws are saying "It's not okay to hate someone, but we'll tolerate you as long as you don't express your hate in attacks on people." I think that's fair. Hatred that gets so bad that it makes you want to attack someone is way too antisocial for a civilized society. I think it's naive to think that feelings of extreme hatred are safe or acceptable.

So if someone decides they hate old white straight men and goes out and kills one they'll be charged with a hate crime? =D

Ideally, if they targeted these men specifically because they were white/men/etc. and for no other reason, then they would be. That they might not be in every instance is irrelevant to the idea of having hate crimes laws and more an issue of making sure the laws are applied fairly, which is a valid point to make if we're discussing the practical realities of these laws, but I was under the impression we were still talking about the merits of these laws on their face.

 

[Oryx]

The hate crime distinction reminds me of the distinction between murder and manslaughter, tbh. From my understanding of the two, if a killing is preplanned and intentional, it's considered murder. If it's something not preplanned but in the "passion of the moment", it's voluntary manslaughter. What's the difference between the two? The thoughts beforehand. Why is that more okay than assault/hate crime+assault?

 

[FreakyLocz14]

The hate crime distinction reminds me of the distinction between murder and manslaughter, tbh. From my understanding of the two, if a killing is preplanned and intentional, it's considered murder. If it's something not preplanned but in the "passion of the moment", it's voluntary manslaughter. What's the difference between the two? The thoughts beforehand. Why is that more okay than assault/hate crime+assault?

Those are two completely separate legal issues. The murder-manslaughter distinction deals with intent, while hate crimes deal with motive.

 

[Esper]

Those are two completely separate legal issues. The murder-manslaughter distinction deals with intent, while hate crimes deal with motive.

Pardon my lack of legal expertise, but don't intent and motive mean essentially the same thing: why you did something? Or is it like... if my motive is just that I hate certain people, and I happen to attack someone I hate, that is different than if I hate certain people and walk out the house that day with the specific intention of attacking someone I hate?

 

[FreakyLocz14]

Pardon my lack of legal expertise, but don't intent and motive mean essentially the same thing: why you did something? Or is it like... if my motive is just that I hate certain people, and I happen to attack someone I hate, that is different than if I hate certain people and walk out the house that day with the specific intention of attacking someone I hate?

Motive is the reason you did something.

Intent is whether you committed a crime on purpose, through recklessness/negligence, or on accident.

You seem to have it down. For example, a burglary in California is defined as entering an dwelling with specific intent to commit theft or any other felony (Cal. Penal Code § 459).

The intent doesn't deal with WHY you committed burglary, but if you had the intent to commit burglary.

 

[Dawn]

What I was trying to say is that I had the feeling that people who already have something against queer people are going to be more likely to attack specifically queer people (if they attack anyone at all, which the overwhelming majority won't) and that they'll be the people most in need of learning a bit of tolerance while also being the ones most likely to opt out if there is the option of doing so.

Let me give another example to add to your hypothetical comparison. Joe Doe is not an aggressive person, but he hates queer people and gets the idea to attack a queer person. He gets arrested and charged with a hate crime. He wouldn't have attacked anyone if he weren't so hateful so it's his hatred which is at fault.

So... an ordinarily peaceful person attacks someone, and gets convicted easier because he has an opinion against homosexuals, and gets a harsher sentence... And his hatred is at fault? I thought we were allowed to hate, and if we're allowed to hate as long as we don't hurt someone over it, then why aren't we punishing people for the act of hurting someone instead of hating them? Seems backwards.

Essentially, hate crimes laws are saying "It's not okay to hate someone

But it /is/ okay to hate someone. That's what freedom's all about. It's not a good thing to hate someone, but our freedoms are all about being able to make bad decissions to a degree. Hating people, smoking, etcetera.

Ideally, if they targeted these men specifically because they were white/men/etc. and for no other reason, then they would be. That they might not be in every instance is irrelevant to the idea of having hate crimes laws and more an issue of making sure the laws are applied fairly, which is a valid point to make if we're discussing the practical realities of these laws, but I was under the impression we were still talking about the merits of these laws on their face.

But hate crimes /don't do that/. If we applied hate crimes as loosely as we do now even to non-minorities we'd have hate crime charges everywhere. Hate crimes as a concept were created specifically to defend minorities, not majorities. Seriously, try googling hate crimes against whites. You'll find that not only are most of the results about how nobody gets charged for that but that New York specifically states that whites aren't protected whatsoever.

And er... I suppose you could say I'm very much accusing hate crimes of being hypocrisy, though I personally resent using that word altogether.

 

[Alley Cat]

Are the actions of someone who is a majority more closely scrutinized than someone who is not? I.E. A white person get's a "White Pride" tattoo. Someone sees this, accuses them of being racist. A black person get's a "Brown Pride" tattoo, yet no one bats an eye. Does anyone else tend to notice something like this? Also, is what classifies a hate crime determined by what is socially acceptable? Like for instance... say I hated men who beat women, with society's general consensus being that men aren't to hit women, would someone view this crime(my hatred for a woman-beater) as a hate crime? Or would they simply pass it off as just murder/assault on my behalf because he is not a minority/is something generally viewed as "wicked"?