Your privilege to hold that position, John. But it ignores the fact that gay-bashing does exist (someone link to that multi-page thread, please?), that anti-black prejudice does exist, that anti-Semitism does exist. And that society, as a general rule, deplores them and attempts to penalize and minimize them.
I never said that gay bashing doesn’t exist or that prejudice against Blacks doesn’t exist. I know both exist. I’m not seeing where you got that from my posts.
Why don’t we protect accountants? Maybe if there actually were a lot of accountant violence, they should be protected. Since there isn’t, keep hate crime legislation to race and gender.
Well, I am, sort of, an opponent of hate crimes laws. Motive has always been important in sentencing - it isn’t anything new. I don’t think we need a special law to recognize one of these things is worse than the other, and punish it more severely.
Trouble is, this requires trusting judicial discretion. And the trend seems to have been away from that, towards one-size-fits-all punishments.
What do you mean “keep”? It currently covers a lot more than those two categories. I’m not proposing that we list all the categories-- in fact I propose listing no categories. If we have increased punishment for “hate crimes” it shouldn’t matter towards whom the hate is directed. Currently, it looks like we are saying hating certain groups is worse than hating other groups. That’s divisive, and that’s one reason some people oppose hate crimes.
But by saying that race is a protected category, then white people get exactly the same amount of “protection” as do black people.
And really, there has to be some specificity in the law about what constitutes hate. Racism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, etc. are certainly matters in which we can conceptually correlate bigotry with an effect on society (propagating racism, intolerance, etc).
If I see you walking down the street, and I yell, “I hate the 49ers! Take your Candlestick Park and get out of this country!” and proceeded to pound on you because you’re wearing a Joe Montana jersey, are you really saying that my hatred of sports teams in your area is really a societal problem and serious crime on the same level as my actions being inspired by racism, xenophobia, or other bigotry? Because if every difference between people were a protected class, then we get into more severe punishments for things that aren’t a problem in society (hating the 49ers).
You also seem to be teetering on the same specious logic as Shodan when you say that it looks like we’re protecting some people (I assume minorities) more than others (I assume white Christian straight men). Again, this is false. An Al Qaeda terrorist who beheads me because I’m in the latter category is subject to a hate crimes law on the same basis as a neo-Nazi bigot attacking someone in the former category.
My mistake. I was only thinking about the two most prominent categories.
And you’re mistaken as well. As Ravenman said, protection goes both ways. Hate crime legislation that is based on, for example, race, protects both the black guy killed by white supremacists, and the white guy killed by black supremacists. They are equal in the eyes of the law.
For someone to say that it is wrong because some minority group gets more protection is acknowledging that those minority groups are more unfairly targeted. Why else would you trash a law that protects white people just as much as blacks unless you know black people are targeted more frequently?
I suspect the real question a lot of people opposed to such legislation want to ask is: “So what if minorities get targeted more and are more likely to get hurt? That’s not my problem”