See the similarity to terrorism, which Esprix has already mentioned? The whole point of it is to inspire terror among gay people, to discourage them from being openly gay and to ensure that they will live in fear. You summed it up nicely, andygirl.
Beating a guy up because he is gay is different from getting into a bar fight with someone over a girl. I don’t know how different it is from just randomly beating someone up on the street for no particular reason, but at any rate it deserves serious punishment.
I guess my problem is that I look at this from the point of view of the person murdered. Me, if I’m murdered, whether it’s because I’m a random target or because I’m a Black Jewish Lesbian Republican, I still feel like, “Hey! That ain’t right!” And frankly, if I were a random target, I would resent my murder being considered less important, or having less meaning, than someone else’s murder. Why would I not be thought of as being used to make an example of random targets everywhere?
I can certainly see your point, Libertarian, which is why I, for one, am not sure that a bigoted crime should necessarily deserve a stricter punishment than a completely random crime. From the point of view of the victim, both are the same. But from the point of view of the survivors, they are not. I suppose it depends on how you look at crime and punishment…
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. You’re saying that a group of frat boys raping a woman because she is a lesbian just to “teach her a lesson” is more offensive than the same group raping a woman just because she was “bitchy” and “non-responsive” to violent backwards-baseball cap hetero advances.
Skinheads beating a Jew carry the same message that muggers beating a wallet-carrier convey:
Case 1: Don’t be a Jew.
Case 2: Don’t carry a wallet.
And put this through your thick skull: If a random white psycho is beating a random white victim, you can rest assured that Mr. Psychopath doesn’t much care for Mr. Victim. Psycho can put him into traction, but as long as the attacker shows no obvious hate in his heart, he gets off easier than a KKK baseball bat-wielder trolling for negroes.
Violence is violence. You categorize it any way you want.
After that, we’re dealing with nothing more than your own PC agendas now, aren’t we?
So you think a woman being non-responsive to male advances is the equivalent of two men getting into a bar fight? Really…
Muggers beating a wallet-carrier want his money. Skinheads beating a Jew want to rid the world of Jews. The crimes may be equally horrible but the implications are slightly different.
Still, I’m not saying that the two crimes necessarily warrant different punishments. I do feel, however, that the man guilty of the crime mentioned in the OP got off rather lightly. Wouldn’t you agree?
True, spooje, but the real proof of this pudding is whether or not the man would have gotten the same punishment committing the same crime against someone random becuase, oh, let’s say he was having a bad day.
If he would have, then I’d say there’s something wrong with the system in general… as you say, the punishment hardly fits the crime.
If not, and we’re assuming he would have gotten a more severe punishment if it were not a crime directed at gays, then that’s a problem with the system too, but one that could be solved by simply demanding equal punishment for equal crimes.
It seems that the real issue is whether or not punishments are fitting their related crimes in general. Is 12 months of probation and a few “anger counseling” classes appropriate for beating someone within an inch of his or her life? Far from it. But I’d like to make sure that everyone who is victim to that sort of abuse can count on the perpetrator being punished appropriately.
Hate crimes have been “done” over in Great Debates several times. But, Lib., I would submit to you that while there is no objective difference between any two persons being killed, what one fails to take into account in opposing hate crimes legislation on that basis is that one has the right to do things as well as the right to retain one’s life.
A perfectly closeted gay person with no mannerisms that would suggest the stereotype of gayness has nothing to fear from gay bashers. A woman who can perfectly conceal her biological gender need not fear any gender discrimination.
But neither is allowed to be him/herself – they must play a role assigned by society. The woman afraid of hitting a glass ceiling who disguises herself as a man to rise in the corporate hierarchy has no opportunity to be a woman, lest she give herself away. Ask any gay person here what being closeted does to one’s self-image.
It differs only in degree, not in kind, from serfdom or slavery – you have every right to live here so long as you do what I say and nothing I forbid.
If freedom in the abstract means anything, it means that such a state of affairs is intolerable to a civilized man or woman, whether or not s/he him/herself is subjected to such treatment.
“How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?”
In libertarian philosophy, freedom means “the absence of coercion”. And I believe that everyone who does not abridge the freedom of others is entitled to be free.
you know, the one that says “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
In a totally different context, I used the line “love the sinner, hate the sin” to a friend who is gay, and he told me he HATES that quote because of the way it has been subverted to chastise gay people. I will never think of that phrase in quite the same way.
Funny how people who purport to be Christian would hurt someone in Christ’s name, especially in light of the fact that there is a possibility that Christ himself was gay.
I think that hate crime legislation is absolutely necessary and sends this message: in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are not free to live our lives peacefully until this applies to all people, and it is not brave to attack anyone, for whatever reason, be it their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexualy orientation, financial circumstances, or _______________________ [insert word of your choice].
[list=1][li]Crimes motivated by hate have already been recognized by Congress; for example, the Church Arson Protection Act of 1996.[/li][li]Hate crime laws protect everyone - race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender and disability are all covered, and every victim has at least one of these.[/li][li]People are not punished for their thoughts, but for their actions.[/li][li]States who have hate crime laws on the books have not experienced any abridging of free speech; in fact, it ought to promote free speech by giving those who are usually oppressed more freedom to express themselves without fear of retribution.[/li][li]Laws are intended to be deterrents, and the hate crime classification might deter someone from their illegal actions. It is right and proper for a government to send a message to its people that tolerance is the law of the land from the highest levels.[/li][li]Hate crimes do not increase penalties for hate crimes, but rather serves as a law enforcement tool that allows federal assistance in investigation and prosecution. For this reason these laws are widely supported from many law enforcement officials and organizations.[/list=1][/li]
Even I do not consider myself an expert on such laws, so I’ll let people more knowledgeable than I speak instead.
Intent to commit the crime, sure, but this is about who you choose as a victim. If you pick some person, you get one kind of sentence; if you choose someone else, you get less.
And it just isn’t true that ‘hate crime legislation protects everyone’. How about a straight white male who gets shot so that somebody can steal his wallet? He was targetted because he carried a wallet. I grant you it would probably be easier to stop carrying a wallet than to stop being gay/black/a woman/whatever, but why are we defining wallet-carriers as a class of persons less worthy of the protection of the law?
Intent generally (AFAIK) refers to how conscious the person who commits the crime of the seriousness of his crime. We punish premeditated murder more severely than manslaughter because of our collective judgement that a person who consciously decides to commit murder is more dangerous (to society at large) than someone who gets ‘carried away’.
A serious crime is an offense against society in general. Gay-bashing is evil and wrong because it is wrong to beat people up in general, not because any one group is more worthy of living in peace than any other.
Would the level of punishment in the OP be more appropriate if it was a beating inflicted by some gang-banger on a person who inadvertently wore the colors of some rival gang? Obviously not. But this is a function of level of violence, not the sexual orientation of the victim.
I haven’t completely made up my mind about this issue but I did have a question about this statement. How exactly do they assist law enforcement officers in investigating a crime and/or prosecuting it?
I don’t think any statistics have been compiled nation-wide for Canada, but I know our local help-line gets about a call a week from a gaybashing victim. Most people are too afraid to go to the police, and given what I’ve seen of the police response, I’m not surprised. They didn’t seem to do much about a string of murders of gay men in Montreal a few years ago.
**
I’ve never had a boyfriend who was confident enough to kiss or hug in public. It’s funny that we actually have to think about these things. No one else in North America has to.
I’d just like to add that I’ve found my supportive straight friends are more willing to do this than most of my gay friends. It’s like we’re all scared of rocking the boat, of a backlash.
Maybe those fears are justified. I mean, we don’t just risk violence for speaking out, although that’s the worst-case scenario.
I’ve caught myself worried about speaking out at work, even in a place where I’m constitutionally protected. I’ve usually decided to do it anyway. But if an employer really doesn’t like you, he or she can always find an excuse to fire you.
I actually know someone who was fired from a Starbucks for being gay – a Starbucks, of all places! I mean, he one his discrimination complaint, and the manager was fired, but if you can’t be out at a Starbucks, is anywhere safe?
one thing that bothers me about hate crime laws is that they don’t recognise that everyone else is as PC in their language as people on this board. A guy could get into a fight with someone else (for a “legitimate” reason) and beat him to a pulp all the while calling him a goddam faggot (simply because it’s a generic, all purpose insult as well as a pointed slur) and then get an extra couple of years added onto his sentence when it turns out that the guy was actually gay.
I agree. I mean, we make a distinction of intent between first and second degree murder, and manslaughter, so intent already plays a part in legal considerations. For something to be criminal, there has to be intent, and there has to be an act.
What hate crimes legislation tries to take into account is that there is a certain group of despicable people who prey on people, usually strangers, simply because they are different, and their intent is to terrorize those an entire group.
When, say, a man murders another man in a fit of jealousy,his victims are the man he kills, and that man’s family and friends. When, say, Matthew Shepherd was killed, his murderer’s victims were Shepherd, his friends and family, and millions of gays and lesbians across North America, especially those in Laramie, Wyoming, who felt suddenly a lot less safe.
