Protected classes can be established where the government feels crimes against ‘x’ are occurring and may not be being prosecuted with they same vigor as crimes against ‘y’. The state recognizes bigotry occurs even within our own justice system and has taken measures to be able to step in if necessary in cases where they feel justice is not appropriate for the crime committed.
Before this law goes into effect it has been reasonable for lawyers defending those who have committed crimes against gays to use the ‘gay panic defense.’ The defense uses the innate homophobia in our society to justify the crime commited against the victim to the jury. It has been a working defense in multiple occasions to allow criminals to escape justice. Crimes that would have been a slam dunk case for the prosecution if the victim had been picked for other means. Hate crimes legislation makes the defense think twice about such strategies as making the argument hurts their defense to the hate crime charges.
They’re not equivalent crimes. One is motivated by bigotry, the other is not. The yuppie is still no less protected from crimes based on his race, religion, sexuality, etc. than anybody else, though.
Yuppies and abortion doctors still have races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations and religions, though. It is a misrepresentation to present them as if they are a group separate and apart from all the other groups. They aren’t excluded from the legislation. They are covered by it.
Your husband is protected under ALL those things. If you kill him for any of those reasons, it’s a hate crime. It doesn’t matter if you’re the same color, or whatever.
Your facetious scenario wouldn’t even be applicable because you don’t have a desire to commit a crime against anybody because of any protected status, none of it would be a hate crime.
Yeah, the Movie of the Week argument, like I said.
Anyway, I already said that SCOTUS declared this to be OK, so I’m not really interested in arguing about it. Let’s just be clear that this type of legislation does treat different groups differently. To say otherwise is like saying anti-SSM laws treat everyone the same because any man/woman can marry any member of the opposite sex whether they are straight or gay.
I don’t think that analogy really holds. The problem with Scalia’s classic statement (made in the context of sodomy laws) is just that he incorrectly frames the inquiry as equality of freedom to marry and have sex. But what is unequal about the laws is not the act of marriage or sex itself, but that straight people can marry and have sex with the people whom they love and are sexually attracted to, and gay people cannot.
Here, there is no such inequality between groups. Everyone is protected from being the victim of a crime based on his race, sexual orientation, etc. Hate crimes laws apply equally to black-on-white violence and white-on-black violence (and have historically been used more often in the former category). And equally to gay-on-straight violence as straight-on-gay. There is no discrete group that is treated differently, instead there are intents that are treated differently (e.g. intent to assault on the basis of race vs. on the basis of fashion disagreement). So while it treats race as being different from fashion disagreement, it does not treat white people different from black people, or gay different from straight.
I think they are a bad idea for other reasons, but I think the “treat different groups differently” reason doesn’t really hold up.
There is in that it treats groups differently depending on whether the group is a protected class or not; it singles out certain classes for protection. To use John Mace’s example, if I kill you because you’re gay or straight, black or white, woman or man, Christian or non-Christian; if I kill you because you’re in one of those protected classes, I’m subject to the law. If I kill you because you’re an abortion doctor (or if I kill you because you’re not an abortion doctor), or because you’re a yuppie (or not a yuppie), that’s not a protected class, so the hate crimes law doesn’t come into play.
I don’t necessarily think this is a problem or reason not to support the law, but it certainly does distinguish protected classes, and there’s an inequality between the group “gays” on one hand, and “yuppies” on the other, for instance.
It absolutely does treat protected characteristics different from unprotected ones, but that is entirely different from treating some groups of people differently from others. The main difference is that every single human has the protected characteristics.
Many many laws, heck the United States Constitution itself, distinguish protected characteristics from unprotected ones. That is very different from imposing different requirements on different discrete groups of people.
IOW, the objection would be valid if the law increased penalties for attacking gay people. But that’s not what it does. It increases penalties for crimes against people on the basis of sexual orientation (among other characteristics).
Well, that’s a different argument, and I didn’t really mean to get into that since the SCOTUS has already ruled it OK. It’s just that others in this thread have insisted that, for example, “No group is more protected than any other.” That is simply false. We set up certain “protected classes” for which committing a crime while hating that class is worse than committing the exact same crime against a different class. If that’s what we’re doing, let’s at least admit it.
Then why do we need “classes”? Just say that if the crime was motivated by “hate” of or to “intimidate” any person or group of people, it’s a hate crime.
Isn’t that what this is?
If we have a belief that all people are either a member of X, Y or Z groups:
Then
If you attack a person solely because he belongs to X group of people- it’s a hate crime.
If you attack a person solely because he belongs to Z group of people- it’s a hate crime.
Same deal for attacking the Y group.
Now you’ve protected all the groups, I’d say that sounds like a pretty nice and equal protection right there. Now if the statistics show that it’s more likely that group X is singled out and attacked, well fair enough, but we’re not going to just protect group X, you protect all the possible groups with the law. So hopefully we can reduce all attacks on people for the basis of X,Y,Z hate crimes. Though it may be of particular benefits currently to group X, in the long run it’ll protect all the 3 groupings. As opposed to a law that simple said “People of Group X are protected- do not attack them”- which I would totally agree is unfair and certainly a law that has favoritism.
The tricky part though is we have multiple groups, each one with their own X,Y,and Zs (Race, Gender, Religious views, etc). Each one has to sort of be down on their own sort of thing. The ones which are innate and unchangeable should certainly be protected, and maybe in the long run we can just try to reduce the umber of hate crimes in general (though I’m cynical enough to that this single law isn’t going to do that- nor will the threat of extra punishments be enough to stop a person from hating on another).
But it’s a start and a nice idea towards the whole equality thing at least for this one variable/series of groups.
I think you’re missing his point. Every person is protected, but not every group is protected. If I kill you because you’re straight, that’s a hate crime. If I kill you because you’re gay, that’s a hate crime. If I kill you because you’re bisexual, that’s a hate crime. If I kill you because you’re an accountant, that’s not a hate crime. Even if I hate accountants; even if I make it my goal to kill all the accountants I can, it’s still not a hate crime under the law.
I think he wants to see the punishment be just as bad if somebody kills accountants because they’re accountants, as if they kill gay people because they’re gay.
A protected classification is enacted into law, or recognized in case law, specifically because there is evidence that people discriminate on the basis of it. Gay-bashing, anti-black racism, the ‘glass ceiling’ for women in business, anti-Semitism, the anti-Irish sentiment of 170 years ago, the anti-Hispanic ‘nativism’ of parts of modern US culture, left-handers being forced to write right-handed, etc. There is no significant harassment or discrimination against people with hazel eyes, or with long, slender fingers, or presence/absence of chest hair. If there were, then those characteristics would become potential protected classes.
Right, but doesn’t that make something of a mockery of the claims, made by some folks upthread, that current hate crime laws apply to us all equally and are therefore not an example of unequal protection under the law? They were, in general, designed to protect fairly specific groups, and that’s what they do.
Also, your argument sort of misses what i think is a key aspect of this whole debate:
Yes, these laws were enacted because of things like gay-bashing, anti-black racism, etc., etc. But the main reason that these sort of crimes have, in American history, been able to flourish, is NOT the absence of hate-crime laws, but the fact that the more universal laws already on the books were unequally and poorly enforced. Crimes against these particular groups were inadequately policed, often intentionally so. It has never in the past century, to my knowledge, been legal to assault someone merely for being gay. Every gay-bashing incident during that period should have been investigated properly; if it wasn’t, this was due to a failure of will on the part of authorities. There are myriad examples of police not only ignoring assaults on homosexuals, but committing assaults themselves (Stonewall, for example). In some times and places (parts of the pre-Civil Rights era South, for example), the laws themselves treated people unequally, but that has since been remedied.
If we make clear, as a society, that we’re going to investigate and punish all assaults equally, including the ones on victims from these protected groups; and if we make clear that we will hold law enforcement responsible for doing this, then we effectively shut down the de facto (it was rarely de jure) protection for those who assault gay people, or Jews, or whomever. That is, if we really do treat all assaults equally, it becomes unnecessary to protect particular groups based on whether their assailant is targeting them for being a member of such groups. True equality under the law, accompanied by proper enforcement, should act as an effective protection, without the need for special legislation aimed at particular groups.
I know the history and the reasoning. I just think it’s bunk. If we want to promote equality, then make all groups equal. It’s no more difficult to determine that a guy punched someone because the punchee is black, fat, or an accountant.
Although it’s more likely that someone will be discriminated against for being gay, or being black, or being Jewish, than for being straight, or white, or Presbyterian, the law doesn’t contemplate setting up ‘protected classes’ but ‘protected classifications’ – that is, it’s illegal to dscriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, whether you’re a homophobic boss firing a gay employee or a gay boss firing a straight employee (simply because he/she is that orientation – you certainly can fire a black or gay person for petty theft, or excessive absenteeism, or consistent failure to perform assigned duties). Likewise, whether an assault victim is black or gay doesn’t matter; it’s the intent of the assailant that matters. There have been instances of straight people assaulted because the assailant though they were gay, which were hate crimes under the law. And one can easly set up hypothetical cases where the ‘usual’ discriminatory pattern is reversed.