Well, speaking for myself only, i’m a political lefty, and i tend to be opposed to hate crime legislation, even though i understand the very real historical circumstances and current discrimination that impels such legislation.
Fundamentally, i believe that if people commit criminal acts, we should punish those acts. I really don’t think it is wise to spend too much time speculating on what type of hatred and prejudice—if any—may or may not have been going through the perpetrator’s head at the time of the criminal act. Much as i loathe the type of hatred that some people carry around with them, we shouldn’t be criminalizing thought.
The law already allows a certain amount of speculation about the offender’s state of mind, when it contemplates issues such as premeditation. Personally, i think that if someone commits an unprovoked and premeditated attack on someone else, then that is, in itself, a heinous enough crime to merit a significant sentence. It shouldn’t matter whether or not the criminal had some racial or gender or other phobia bouncing around in his head at the time.
We’ve debated hate crime issues here before, most notably (in my memory, at least) in the very long GD thread about the murder of trans-gender teenager Gwen Araujo. As i said in that thread, the crime itself (strangling and then beating the person to death) was “so heinous that, IMO, no possible ‘hate crime’ legislation should be necessary in order for them to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.”
For me, the whole issue of enforcing hate crime legislation is so fraught with problems and potential inconsistencies that we’re better off focusing on the acts themselves. Of course, what we also need to do is make sure that the law doesn’t allow ridiculous loopholes that have the potential to let these animals get away with what they do.
For example, the defendants in the Matthew Sheppard case in Wyoming put forward what has since been called the “gay panic” defense, the idea being that they were so freaked out by Sheppard’s homosexuality that they lost their minds and killed him. Personally, i think if we’re going to get rid of hate crime laws (which we should), we should also state unequivocally that the simple fact of someone’s difference (their race, their sexuality, their politics, their gender, whatever) is NEVER, under any circumstances, an excuse for assaulting that person or a mitigation of the severity of the crime.
Just MHO.