HATE CRIMES

What’s the Point? Where’s the Fairness?

What is a Hate Crime?

Beginning in 1968, a federal statute made it a crime to threaten to interfere with any person because of race, color, religion or national origin.  At first restricted to cases where someone was engaging in a federally protected activity, the rules changed to basically decide that if a crime was committed against a person who did not share the above categories, the crime was elevated to a hate crime.  Now, most states have similar laws.

Let’s look at the logic of this.  If someone robs you or kills you, does it actually matter to you whether they hated you for some personal characteristic?  I don’t think so.  You’re equally dead, no matter what.  And when you are robbed or otherwise attacked, you feel violated.  You don’t care about motive.

Second: how does someone determine “hate?”  Just because there are differences between the perp and victim doesn’t mean hate is the issue.  We can’t really look into the minds of perpetrators and making assumptions is always a bad idea.  In fact, while it can sometimes help to understand motivation in a crime, why should any motivation cause a crime to incur higher penalties? 

Fairness

If you suppose that increasing penalties for a crime involving hate to be a good idea, where do you draw the line?  Should a man be convicted of a hate crime when he injures or kills his wife when she cheats on him?  He probably hated her at the time of the act.

In practice, hate crimes always seem to be focused on what Woke society calls the victim class.  When a gang of Black men beat up a White man, wouldn’t that be a hate crime?  Except, it isn’t.  Look at the BLM riots.  So many injuries, so many deaths.  How many were prosecuted?  If you look at the videos, you can see a lot of anger and perhaps, hate, in the faces of the bad actors.  And yet, January 6^th protestors are being incarcerated and harassed far more than any BLM rioter.

If it makes sense to add hate crime enhancements to a given crime, doesn’t it make sense that the DA must look for hate in EVERY crime?  Isn’t that fairness under the law?  Our Constitution is clear on this:  you cannot treat people differently under the law.

The Clear Inanity of Hate as a Factor

Audrey Hale shot up a Nashville, private, Christian school killing three children and three staffers.  She showed up at the school she had attended years back with three guns, including two “assault rifles,” as well as maps of the school and her detailed manifesto.  Obviously, she/he had some beef with the school.  Some media types claim she was upset simply with the institution.  But she killed Christians, perhaps believing that they aren’t supportive of transgenderism. Isn’t this a hate crime?

The amount of weapons and ammo she carried indicated a plan to do a lot more damage.  She was stopped only when she was killed.  Aren’t these kinds of mass murder usually inspired by hate and anger?

The Right Way

For almost every act of violence, we have prescribed penalties for convicted criminals.  Though current Soros-supported DAs aren’t even willing to even charge many criminals now, let alone convict them, when we do have a real case before a judge, why should hate matter?  Is it worse to kill someone because they have a different skin color than because they simply wanted to kill someone?  I don’t think so.  And in reality, the way the law is being applied pushes juries to convict people of hate crimes simply because they look different.  There’s too much about politics in hate crime law, instead of considered jurisprudence.

Consider the elderly.  We are perceived as easier victims because we appear to be more mobility-limited and less strong.  Has anyone been convicted of a hate crime for hurting the old?  Why not?  Every person deserves the right to live free from fear of being harmed or killed.  We may wish to know if groups are being particularly targeted; that helps law enforcement manage a particular problem.  But we don’t need to decide that one person’s life is more important or valuable than another’s. 

Let’s go back to judging crimes based on existing laws without politicizing the entire process.  Wouldn’t we perhaps have LESS hate if we weren’t so focused on determining how different we are from each other?  Looking at our DNA, we all have more in common with each other.  Coming together as Americans might be the best thing that could happen.