And, again, your ignorance on hate crimes legislation is showing. Hate crime laws do not in any way alter the punishment for the commission of a crime.
I’ll leave someone more versed like matt_mcl or Polycarp for the cites, 'cause it’s late and I’m going to bed now.
Esprix
Oh, and Jack, could you cite me somewhere where ACT-UP (which is, by and large, no longer the spokesorganization for gay or AIDS rights, and hasn’t been for, oh, nigh on 10 years or so, right around the time the disease got “mainstreamed,” for lack of a better word) did anything like this recently? And even if you can’t, I daresay the Roman Catholic church has been anti-gay for just a tad longer than the AIDS epidemic. :rolleyes:
Esprix
JohnBckWLD, thank you for the cites.
**
Not to mention an institution that in the name of faith has obstructed justice and hindered prosecution in order to cover up for certain of its raiment-wearing child-molesting members… but that’s a subject for another thread.
I respectfully disagree. First of all, a vandal is one who defaces or destroys property. Running naked through a church service whilst lobbing condoms would be indecent exposure and disturbing the peace, but not vandalism. At any rate, religious institutions including the Catholic Church benefit from a special legal status in the USA. In addition to being covered by two provisions of the First Amendment, the “free exercise” and the “free speech” clauses, in a way that other organizations are not (e.g. any content it might publish is not subject to the review of any regulatory body like the FTC), the Catholic Church is tax-exempt and it has the power to perform (or not perform) weddings. This puts them under the purview of the public. Since the Catholic Church itself is denying other Catholics their natural rights, there’s a perfectly valid prerogative for acts of civil disobedience against said Church.
Disclaimer: IANAL, just a pretty well-informed and educated citizen as to the legal system.
Criminal Court judges pass sentences for crimes committed, but it is the legislature’s job to set up the sentencing guidelines to begin with. The law grants discretionary powers to a judge in many cases to tailor an appropriate punishment to a given case. For instance, the legislated punishment for a crime might be a range of ten to thirty years imprisonment, and the judge picks a number within that range depending on the aggravating and mitigating factors in the case. However, the ultimate power to determine punishments for crimes lies in a legislative body, and it is not an “intrusion” to specify an additional penalty for a crime if it has a hate factor to it.
I suppose you could argue that the penalties called for by hate crime laws are “cruel and unusual” and thus violate the Eighth Amendment, but otherwise a legislature is perfectly within its rights when it passes anti-hate crime legislation. The only other possible legal challenge I can think of would be to argue that hate crime sentencing standards violate Fourteenth Amendment equal protection and due process guarantees. I invite any lawyers reading this thread to explain why those dogs won’t hunt.
At any rate, Kirkland, I’m very surprised that you’re so vehemently philosophically opposed to anti-hate crimes legislation. Is it because you don’t want to be accused of asking for “special” legal protection? Are you saying that like political correctness and affirmative action, an argument can be made that hate crime laws do more harm than good? If I may, Kirkland, let me salve your conscience by pointing out that when a certain portion of the populace is specially targeted for egregiously wrongful and criminal treatment (the particulars of which I’m sure you’re more familiar with than anyone else here), the state has a compelling interest to protect the targets of such disproportionate injustice with a proportionate legal response. Think of it as legal triage, if you will.
What we’ve got here is a prime example of class prejudice in America. If an upper class college kid gets killed for being gay (and it’s not even clear that’s the only reason he was killed), it makes headline news across the country, and lefties everywhere weep and moan. Let a poor or working class kid get killed indisputably because he was gay, and the news barely makes it off the back pages of the local papers.
I’ve long said that liberals hate poor and working class whites. The contrast in the amount of attention these two different cases received tends to confirm that view. Certainly this incident shows that lefties care nothing about what happens to us.
At least old fashioned socialists pretended to like us.
A crime is a crime. The important factor is WHAT is done, not why they did it. if a person kills me becaus I’m gay, when another person kills my brother because he’s well off, then they both deserve the exact same punishemnt (to be thrown in a hole for the rest of their lives, a crust of moldy bread to eat each day, and daily beatings until life is so miserable that they shatter their glass of dirty water one afternoon and jab the shard into their own throat). If you start saying “these thoughts or beliefs make these crimes more ‘wrong’” how far is that from saying that “these thoughts and beliefs are in and of themselves illegal.” That goes against the entire concept of freedom of speech, which inlcudes freedom to think things that are horrible and disgusting.
Hate crime laws are nothing more than candy liberal politicians use to try to dupe minority voters into continuing to vote for them. They’re a political ploy.
Crime should be defined by what you do, not why you do it.
Kirk
Tsk, tsk, Esprix. You have it exactly backwards. In fact, hate crime laws cannot do anything other than alter the punishment for the commission of a crime. The Supreme Court ruled in R.A.V. v. St. Paul that making the expression of hate on its own a crime was an unconstitutional infringement of the right of free speech. Subsequently, it ruled in Wisconsin v. Mitchell that a court could permissibly consider as a factor in determining sentence that a crime was motivated by hatred of a minority class. As a result of these two holdings, all hate crime laws are expressed as sentencing enhancers.
FYI, the hate crimes hijack has been moved here.
Esprix
To go back to the Jesse Dirkhising reference, I’ve seen this pulled up in tandem with the Matthew Shephard incident almost since the two events occurred. And I still don’t understand the supposed connection.
Shephard was killed in large part because he was gay. Yes, they robbed him. But he was beaten and left to die because two hopped-up homophobes were feeling creepy about “playing gay” to get money for drugs.
Dirkhising, even if we ignore the evidence that suggests that he, himself, was indeed gay and into older men (disregarding the legality of participation by those older men for the moment), was not killed because he was straight. Evidence points to bondage play gone bad, in my understanding.
And the horrified gasps of “How dare you say Jesse was gay?!” are misplaced, IMO, and more than a little Mrs. Grundy-ish. I certainly knew I liked men long before I was 15. The idea that a teenager is some sort of sexual tabula rasa until they turn 18 is outdated, usually politically self-serving, and just plain wrong. Am I the only adult who remembers being a teenager?
This is not, of course, to say that what seemed to be going on between Dirkhising and his killers was right. It certainly wasn’t legal (although legal != right, necessarily). And to suggest that Jesse gave his (non-legally-sufficient) consent to the acts that caused his death is not to blame him for it. In the same way that to recognize that Shephard was most likely looking for “rough trade” that night is not the same as blaming him for his own death.
But the incidents are nowhere near the sexual mirror-images that some people seem to want them to be.
jayjay