New hate crimes bill passed: good or bad?

Great Debates
61

I’m curious how opponents of hate crime laws would view these scenarios. If motivation is not to be taken into account, it seems they should be punished equally, no? And yet, it also seems very clear to me that defacing a synagogue with a swastika is an order of magnitude more serious than defacing a Starbucks with a sports logo. If the crimes are to be treated differently, how do you craft that difference without falling afoul of the flaw you see in hate crimes legislation?

Can you explain how you derive that from Ravenman’s post? It seems to be a total non-sequitor to me.

62

Do you think a hate crime can only be perpetrated on a minority? This seems to be what you’re arguing, and I’ll say it again: you are misrepresenting the law. All of these examples of crime are protected to the exact same extent by the hate crimes law:

  1. Al Qaeda beheading me because I’m American.
  2. A violent Amazon raping you because you’re a man.
  3. A neo-Nazi beating some someone because they are Jewish.
  4. A martian shooting his ray gun at a woman because she’s Egyptian.
  5. A Catholic kneecapping an Irish tourist because he’s Protestant.

And so on, and so on, and so on.

63

They can’t explain it, which is why none of them have responded to it yet.

64

And this sort of question is what makes the whole thing difficult for me, and is why i generally oppose hate crime legislation, on the one hand, and yet am not too worried about its existence, on the other.

While i agree that the two examples you give are different in their levels of seriousness, the question for me is whether this is merely a moral issue, or one that the legal system should also take into account.

At bottom, both crimes really are nothing more than property crimes. For me, a religious building (synagogue, church, etc.) holds no more value, in a legal sense, than a business or a private house. Furthermore, i believe that, in a country where church and state are supposed to be separate, the law should also treat those buildings in the same way. If it costs $1000 to clean the swastika off the synagogue, and $1000 to clean the sport logo off the Starbucks, i tend to think that the crimes are essentially of equal magnitude.

This doesn’t mean that i think they are morally the same. But while our legal system is, in many ways, a reflection of certain moral values, i’m cautious about how far this should be taken, particularly when it comes to issues of thought and expression. I make a very particular, and very harsh, personal moral judgment of people who throw around words like “faggot” and "nigger’ and “kike” in ways intended to cause offense and hurt, but the fact that i find this sort of thought and expression morally reprehensible doesn’t mean that i think it should be legislated against, or punished by the legal system.

65

Jesus, Sam, “authority of the state”? The reason, TTBOMK, that we have higher penalties for the assault on or murder of a police officer (and sometimes of other emergency workers) is that they put their lives on the line for the benefit of the body politic, It constitutes a strong disincentive to attempts on the life of someone willing to risk it for the common benefit.

66

No, they do not. To take a classic instance of BS at face value, if Jerry Falwell’s famous claim that he had been assaulted by rioting gay men in California had in fact been true, that would have been an example of a hate crime – because he was (or claimed to be) targeted on the basis of his sexual or religious orientation.

A black gang targeting a white kid “intruding on their turf” is similarly committing a hate crime. It’s not being black or gay or Jewish that invokes hate crime penalties, it’s the motive of the crime – that it was committed owing to the race, or sexual orientation, or religion of the victim. Regardless of what that race or sexual orientation or religion may be.

67

There is, however, not a body of evidence suggesting that people commit crimes against others on the basis of whether they have wallets in their pickets.

Note that motive or intent is often an element in crime – murder vs. manslaughter vs. negligent homicide, for example, are distinguished on the basis of intent. Drug crimes distinguish between simple possession and possession with the intent to sell. Is “intent to terrorize a minority” in some special class that makes the minority not as deserving of protection?

68

Tell me, do you read what it is you’re commenting on, or do you simply use it as a handy hook on which to hang an insult to liberals?

69

I disagree that they’re of equivalent magnitude, because they do not have an equivalent number of victims. The only victim in the Starbucks’ example is the person who owns the Starbucks. Defacing a synagogue, on the other hand, is a crime aimed at every person who uses the synagogue, or who even passes by the synagogue. It’s not just a property crime, but also an attempt to intimidate a specific subsection of the population. Of course, there are also laws against intimidation, but they tend to be more specific: if I get up in your face and threaten to give you a beating if you don’t go back to Australia, that’s a prosecutable threat. If I spray paint “Kill the Aussies” on the side of a building in an area with a lot of Australian immigrants, I’ve threatened a lot more people, but paradoxically, I’d be facing a much smaller penalty. (At least, that’s my understanding of the law absent hate crime legislation. Actual lawyers are free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

Similarly, if I beat a man to take his wallet, my intent is simply to get some money. If a beat a man because he’s black, and I want black people to know that they aren’t welcome in my neighborhood, that’s a bigger crime than simple assault and robbery. I have a malicious intent that goes beyond my immediate victim, and I think that’s it’s just and proper to take that larger intent into consideration when weighing the crime.

70

How about if I punch a well dressed guy in the face a say “Damn, I hate yuppies”. Does that fall under the hate crime provisions? What if I punch you in the face because I hate you? Not because of your race or anything, you just irritate the shit out of me. (Which you don’t, but I’m just trying to understand this stuff.)

71

Since neither socio-economic status, nor being Ravenman are specifically protected by hate crime statutes, the answers to both questions would be “no.”

72

OK. So these laws do treat different people committing equivalent crimes differently. I can scare the shit out of yuppies by beating one up, and it’s not the same as scaring the shit out of Mormons by beating one of them up.

73

Right, but doesn’t that beg the question?

What we’re trying to work out here is not which categories are currently protected by hate crime legislation, but whether those special categories should exist at all.

I think John Mace’s point (and he can correct me if i’m wrong) was probably to observe that the choice of categories itself leaves out many other possible reasons for “hate.” I think hating someone for being gay or black or whatever is a Bad Thing, but the issue here is: Why is it worse, from a social and legal standpoint, than hating people for other reasons that don’t happen to be covered under current legislation? And why is attacking someone, for reasons of hate, worse if you hate Group A than if you hate Group B?

I want to reiterate that this is, for me, something of a Devil’s Advocate position. But my worldview is one strongly informed by Enlightenment rationalism, and by a certain belief in universalism, the idea that laws and standards should apply to people equally.

I recognize that there are times when rejecting universalism can help us correct past injustices. For example, whatever its faults, i think that the idea behind affirmative action was a good one because it specifically sought to address past injustices and to correct the very real current consequences of those past injustices. In an ideal world, i’d be opposed to affirmative action as well, but its the very lack of an ideal world that makes it useful.

The reason i wouldn’t make the same argument, at least not as strongly, in the case of hate crime laws, is that we already have a mechanism for punishing the acts of those who attack, and commit other crimes against people.

74

You arguing from a position that the crimes are equivalent. Not all crimes can be put side by side and compared. It allows the jury to decide if there is reasonable doubt the person committed the crime with the intent to intimidate a specific minority.

75

It doesn’t really matter if they’re equivalent. Killing a yuppie because I hate yuppies is not a hate crime, but punching a gay person because I hate gays is. One is murder, one is a punch. Is murder not worse than punching someone?

Or, how about killing an abortion doctor because I hate abortion doctors. Does that not send a chilling fear through the community of abortion providers? But it’s not a hate crime, right?

76

I don’t like to do this in GD, but… this. If classes are to be protected, sexual orientation should be among them.

77

If there exists a culture of violence towards abortion providers they are a deffined minority and there is an established history of brutal hate crimes towards them I see no reason why they couldn’t be granted minority status for the hate crimes law provision.

We have specific laws to protect minorities in other aspects of the law is it unfair that a racist company owner in Virginia can suffer economic hardships for firing a black man(protected group) because he’s black while a bigot in Virgina can fire a gay man for being gay(non-protected group with without similar consequences?

States and the federal government have for years been able to establish which minorities are more subject to discrimination and have changed ‘protected classes’ as necessary.

Government is stepping in to force the concept of equal protection by making ‘protected classes.’ It does go against some of my personal principles because I feel all things should be equal but as it has proven effective in forcing integration of minorities into our society that might not otherwise happen, I accept it as a necessary evil.

78

Actually, that isn’t true in this case (or in the 1968 law that that this amends).
Under normal circumstances, most crimes are state crimes; there’s no federal jurisdiction. If you were to come over to my apartment and I kill you, then under normal circumstances. I haven’t committed a federal crime. I’ve committed a state crime, and I can and will be arrested by Virginia, but as far as the federal government is concerned, I’m all good.

What you saw happen in the 50s and 60s, though, in parts of the South, is that certain state crimes weren’t being prosecuted in those cases where the victims were black and trying to exercise their civil rights. People were being lynched because they were organizing voter drives, they were being assaulted because they were going to desegregated schools, and so on. And there wasn’t anything the federal government could do about it, because murder and assault and vandalism and so on weren’t illegal under federal law.

So, in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Congress passed a law that made it a federal crime to commit a crime against someone based on their race, color, religion or national origin in order to keep that person from exercising a federal right. That way, in the event that a state wouldn’t prosecute a crime like this, the federal government could.

What this change to the law does, is first, extend federal protection to gender, sexual identity, gender identity, and disability, and second, to remove the restriction that the crime has to have been committed to keep the victim from exercising a federal right.

So in this case, this hate crimes law isn’t just a sentencing issue. 45 states have their own hate crimes laws, and those are predominantly laws that enhance sentencing.

79

How does one measure “a culture of violence”? How many murders tips the balance between regular old violence and hate level violence? The perception is that this is like a Movie of the Week thing, where whoever makes the headlines, gets the “minority status”.

But firing someone isn’t, per se, against the law. Committing violence against someone is already against the law.

Necessary by what measure? This is what I meant by “feel good” legislation. It’s bad to hate “x”, so let’s make extra bad to do harm to “x” as opposed to doing equal harm to “y”. It’s just that “y” doesn’t have the necessary PR dept.

IOW, government makes things equal by making them unequal.

80

To clarify Cap’s post, in the U.S. most criminal law is state law. Killing someone in Austin violates Texas law, killing someone in Omaha, Nebraska’s. For the Federal government to criminalize something, it must be given the power to do so by the Constitution. (Remember Shodan’s Tenth Amendment posts? The basic point he’s right on is that if the Constitution does not delegate the power to the Feds., it’s retained by the states.)

That means that somewhere in the assortment of Sections, paragraphs, and clauses that comprise the Constitution, the Congress has to find a ground on which to criminalize something. So violating someone’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment qualifies, interstate flight to avoid arrest for a murder counts, crimes committed on Federal reservations, in D.C., etc. count. IF you shoot the Mayor of Minneapolis, the Abmassador from Burkina Faso who was visiting him, and the mailman who got in your way as you fled the scene of the other two killings, Minnesota arrests you for the Mayor’s killing, but the Feds. arrest you for killing the Ambassador and the mailman (he’s a federal employee). It can get very tricky to sort this stuff out.