More accurately, an anti-Unitarian hate crime. I mean, he went into a church and started shooting, believing that by targeting UU folks he’d be targeting liberals. How would that NOT be a hate crime?
I hope, though, that he doesn’t get the death penalty. This is a case in which if there’s any deterrence power at all available in the penalty, it’ll be to keep him miserably alive for decades–exactly what these suicide-by-mass-murder schmucks don’t want.
And no, Savage doesn’t deserve much of the blame for this. But he does deserve a little. You’re responsible for your words. Words make a difference. And if you make a living distributing venom, you aren’t innocent when the venom is used.
Do you honestly and sincerely believe that prior to his shooting spree he went into some kind of deep analysis mode to determine the theological stance taken by Unitarians? (As opposed to Trinitarians - they’re another kind of Christian).
Whether he did could not possibly be more irrelevant.
He deliberately targeted Unitarians, based on a belief that they were liberal gaylovers, as demonstrated by his note. To be a hate crime, you have to deliberately target folks due to their membership in a protected class. In this case, he targeted them due to their religion.
If he’d gone to Beth ha Israel and started shooting the place up because he wanted to kill bankers, and he thought that all Jews were bankers, it’d still be a hate crime. He’d have a totally false impression of Jews, sure, but he’d still be targeting them. You don’t have to be familiar with the rituals of Torah display to be an antisemite.
Daniel
Edit: incidentally, your parenthetical note implies that you still think Unitarians are Christians. If you do, fight your ignorance on this subject.
Well I’m a card carrying liberal who would be willing to work on the defense team in such a law suit. Telling someone to kill liberals is probably protected speech. Telling them to kill a particular liberal is probably not protected speech.
According to the news reports, the shooting had been planned for about a week. His ex-wife was a member of that congregation (years ago, not currently), so he probably had a good idea of what UUs are about. It seems that targeting the UUs was more about politics, though, than religion. He knew that most of the people belonging to TVUUC would be “liberals”, so that’s where he went. Political leanings wouldn’t be a protected class, though (right?), so I don’t think that’s what they’re labeling a hate crime.
From what I’ve read, part of what he was disturbed about was the congregation’s acceptance of gays. Is sexual orientation a protected class in TN? Maybe that was the trigger for using the term “hate crime.”
Again, I don’t think that matters. He could have targeted them because he believes that all Gods aren’t one, and unitarians (in his mind) disagree with that. He could have targeted them because his ex-wife was a member of the Unity church, and he got confused. He could have targeted them because once he ate uni at a sushi restaurant, thought it was vile, and wanted to get back and the manufacturers of such a repulsive product.
What matters is that he deliberately targeted members of a protected class: he went somewhere that Unitarians gathered, because Unitarians gathered there (and he thought that by targeting Unitarians he’d achieve another goal). His secondary goal is unimportant: his primary goal was targeting members of a particular religion.
Is that how they determine hate crime (in a legal sense)? I’m not arguing with you - I honestly don’t know. I was under the impression that it was all about primary motivation. I don’t think it’s that a protected class is targeted, but that a protected class is targeted for their protected class-ness.
From what I’ve read, their liberalness was his primary motive, not necessarily their religion. He just knew that he’d find a lot of liberals in a UU church.
No, but telling people to kill group X is not usually considered inciting mass murder.
“Storm the winter palace. Put the bourgeosie up against the wall,” is not generally considered sufficiently likely to incite actual acts of violence that it falls outside the protectionof the first amendment.
“Go to Dr. X’s house tonight, wait for him to come home, and then shoot that abortion-performing mofo between the eyes when he gets out of his car,” is probably not protected, on the other hand.
It can be in part. He had an idea about what UUs were like, and he acted on it.
It would be a strange definition indeed that required the biases motivating a hate crime to be accurate or realistic, or that demanded that the biases constituted good reasons to act.
And now that I reread that, I guess I agree with you that it’s about primary motivation, but we disagree about what his primary motivation was. You think it was religion, I think it was politics. I hope that the people investigating will be able to figure it out and place charges accordingly.
Are you rereading my previous post, or the one with the FBI’s definition in it? Theirs, unlike my previous spouting, doesn’t include “primary motivation.”
Wow. This is right down the road from my home. I was in fact sitting down at home not ten minutes away from there, and go past it several times a week. Guy sounds totally off his rocker to me.
Its kind of moot. Politics and religion are - for better or worse - intertwined. If I wanted to commit a hate crime against gay hating conservatives, I could target the Westboro Baptist Church. If its against gay accepting liberals, well, Unitarians are pretty much at the forefront of the movement. The religious beliefs of UUs - the few tenets UUs have as a “faith” - are politically liberal.
Legally, according to Daniel’s link, religion is a protected class and political affiliations are not. So, when the FBI is trying to figure out whether or not to charge this man with a hate crime, they are going to have to untwine his motivations and decide whether or not this was primarily a crime against people of a certain religion or people of a certain political persuasion. IMO, which may vary greatly from that of the FBI, this crime had less to do with the Seven Principles and more to do with the fact that UU churches are usually filled with liberals.
As it is, I can’t see any way that this WOULDN’T qualify as a hate crime.