There have been a number of arguments both for and against hate crime laws, most of which revolve around emotional issues of justice/injustice and fears of victimization by either other demographic groups or the courts. Proponents say that enforcing harmony with the law protects disempowered or marginal groups from being victimized, while opponents often argue that the laws will be used to target certain groups (e.g. Christians who believe homosexuality is a sin). Both sides make some good points, but the tendency is to argue from a defensive standpoint. Of course, there are also those people who would argue that current laws against assault, murder, vandalism, arson, etc., should be sufficient to protect all citizens, but these arguments are usually shut down by proponents of hate crime laws who point out, factually in most cases, that people who feel this way are members of the majority.
What people on both sides of the debate are failing to do is look at the broader implications of these laws, and what effect they will have on society as a whole. It is a given that America, especially in Democratic states and areas, is an increasingly pluralistic nation. Perhaps the most delicate balancing act for governments in pluralistic societies is giving the impression that all groups are being treated fairly. Proponents of hate crime laws would argue that the laws promote tolerance in a pluralistic society, but if one considers how prosecution works in the US, they actually have the potential to increase political tensions between disparate groups.
Prosecution is selective. This means that the district attorney or prosecutor decides which cases to pursue and which to dismiss. They also decide which charges to file. In most cases this is mainly about expediency, but there is always an element of politics involved. When it comes to hate crimes, the political element grows immensely in a potential prosecution. This is because the hate crime casts an offense against an individual or small group of individuals as an offense against an entire demographic subset. In a sense, these crimes are therefore elevated to something approaching an act of war; the victim’s group becomes the aggrieved party, while the suspect’s group gets the feeling that they are being collectively prosecuted.
As an example of how this could play out, imagine a city in California where a growing, young Mexican population finds itself mingling with white, liberal residents, including a fair number of homosexuals. One warm summer night, the young people are out on the town, everyone full of energy, many full of alcohol. A handsome young Mexican steps out of a restaurant for a cigarette, and two gay white men, intoxicated and enjoying themselves, make a comment about his “nice ass.” The Mexican, having grown up in a culture of machismo, takes this as a very serious insult. He feels it is an assault on his manhood, as it would be in Mexico. Slightly tipsy himself, he immediately feels very warm with anger, and levels a couple insults at the gay couple, who laugh and flip him off. The young Mexican throws down his cigarette, opens the restaurant door, and yells inside for his friends to come out. Somewhat alarmed by his tone, a couple of friends emerge. After a quick discussion in Spanish, the three decide to teach the gay gringos a lesson.
After a black eye, a broken nose, and a couple bruised ribs, a squad car drives by with two officers. The fight breaks up, and the young Mexicans run for it, but one is hauled down by one of the cops. A fire truck arrives with paramedics to treat the beaten gay men. Both end up going to the ER for treatment, but fortunately neither is gravely injured — they’ll both be sore for a while, but they’ll be OK. Meanwhile, the Mexican suspect is driven to the station, where a skillful detective manages through coaxing and coercion to get the names of the other parties involved.
By the next morning, a reporter has already scooped the story and interviewed one of the victims. The victim’s photo, featuring a swollen black eye and bandaged nose appears next to a story titled “Youths Attack Gay Men in Apparent Hate Crime.” Soon the victims both appear on the evening news, describing the suspects and the attack, but leaving out the lewd comment that sparked the attack. Immediately, the gay community is up in arms and the Mexican community is on the defensive. It turns out that one of the kids is a priest’s nephew, and now the Catholics are dragged in. White people who are tired of the influx of Mexicans call for deportations; Mexicans cry racism.
The boys are charged with hate crimes that turn a simple assault into a felony and threaten long jail terms. None is out of high school, although two are over eighteen and can be charged as adults. Suddenly, the entire town is up in arms over the case, each citizen putting his own angle on it. Relations between the white and Mexican residents are set back by years, and resentment grows on both sides.
Of course, a crime has been committed, and it has to be punished, but the original intent of hate crime laws – to enforce harmony between disparate groups – has suddenly achieved the opposite effect. It is a case where no side will accept a just solution, whereas without hate crime hysteria and enhancements, the boys could have received appropriate punishment that was not draconian, and neither the Mexican nor gay community would have emerged with the same degree of distrust and resentment for each other. Introducing the concept of group victimization and punishment has caused groups to entrench themselves rather than integrate with others, and has enforced a ghetto mentality.
This is the future of America if we keep on attempting to use authority to achieve results imagined by disconnected elites. More complexity in law and government does not guarantee more justice — take the convoluted race laws of the old south for example. The basics of law, justice and civil rights are what the criminal justice system should cover, and group dynamics should be left up to citizens to figure out on their own. Enhancing grievances, which is exactly what hate crime laws do, will not promote tolerance so much as it will promote mutual suspicion and nurse a sense of group victimization.
11 responses so far ↓
1 Eric // Apr 28, 2009 at 11:55 am
The first “hate” crimes were in the USSR. If you hit a man who came from a tribe of turks called the Khazars you would be killed under the color of the then current law.
Lenin was a Khazar.
Stalin’s three wifes were Khazar.
Trotsky was a Khazar.
The Khazars made up 50% of the secret police.
Of the 320 Bolshevik party members, 318 were atheist Khazars.
And who where the Khazars? A tribe of central Asian Turks who people spoke a pidgin of Slavic-German-Turkish that we call today Yiddish.
Google the words: 13th Tribe and search Wiki for
more information on the Khazar people.
2 WLindsayWheeler // Apr 29, 2009 at 7:11 am
For a very intelligent and scholarly website, I find this post’s fundamentals very skewered.
In talking about “Hate Laws”, shouldn’t you first discuss this INNOVATION in Western Law. Are “hate Laws” part of the Greco-Roman tradition? Are they part of Christendom and its legacy of laws?
What is the origin of Hate laws; where do they come from; who originated them? Yet, it seems you accept the validity of such laws which seem to appear out of nowhere.
Shouldn’t this be discussed first hand? Their legitimacy? For some reason, you accept them out of hand. The first question should be, “Is this proper Western Law?” The next should be “Is “hate laws” in accordance with the Natural Law?”
I believe “Hate Laws” are Marxist law. It is a Judiazing of Western Law. “Hate Laws” are a product of enforcing political correctness which is Marxist ideology.
A pluralistic society is an oxymoron. It is not part of the Old Order. What is part of the Old Order is racial prejudice which is volkenhass which has existed from time immemorial. Volkenhass is about keeping racial boundaries. Hate Laws are about attacking Volkenhass. Volkenhass is a necessary of ingredient of race. Philosophically, Hate Laws are an invention of ideology, have no place in legal theory and are unjustified and are evil intrinsically for European law and Western civilization.
There are a whole set of problems with Hate Laws. But if one is for the marxization of Western civilization, then Hate Laws are just and normal.
3 Welmer // Apr 29, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Eric and Mr. Wheeler,
I abhor injustice and reject the underlying premise of hate crime law, but let’s be realistic: this kind of preferential treatment is far from a recent innovation that suddenly appeared with Jews.
If anything, it is an ancient form of supremacism carried over from the old country. One can find similar legislation in Yuan China, the Ottoman Empire, and, yes, even ancient Germanic law.
We are all familiar with the weregild, no? Under Anglo Saxon law murdering a Welshman only required half the blood money of an English freeman. Was this any more just than discriminately applied hate crime laws?
If a certain class of people, Jew or gentile, demands preferential treatment, they should be resisted. If you find that it is predominately one group or another demanding this, feel free to expose them, but rather than demanding revenge I think we ought to work toward a radical kind of equality under the law. Perhaps that has grown to be a foreign concept today, but I find it worth fighting for all the same.
4 Raven // Apr 29, 2009 at 5:27 pm
The previous two comments make me wonder what I’m wading into… but here goes.
What do hate crime laws have to do with the “violent Mexicans assaulting crass gays” example you provide? Your spiral of increasing hatred is triggered by the seemingly accurate assessment of a journalist who publishes that the attacks were motivated by hate.
How would the result have been any different if the Mexicans had been charged with assault rather than hate crimes?
5 Lukobe // Apr 29, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Raven wrote “How would the result have been any different if the Mexicans had been charged with assault rather than hate crimes?” The answer: penalty enhancement.
The others of you, leave the Jews out of it.
6 Welmer // Apr 29, 2009 at 6:17 pm
I guess one can’t win with this issue. Raven, I sympathize with all the people involved in my little scenario. The law is more of a blunt hammer than a scalpel, and I’m simply trying to illustrate the unintended consequences of “enhancements.”
If I had my say, the law would have far less influence over our lives, and far more would be up to ordinary, decent people to work things out among themselves.
7 Eman // Apr 30, 2009 at 8:52 am
Check out this excellent new website on Western issues – http://www.toqonline.com/
8 WLindsayWheeler // Apr 30, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I don’t think hate crime legislation is about preferential treatment nor do I see racialism (racial supremacism) in Hate Laws either.
Okay, If I pushed someone. Pushing someone is not a crime. (I know in our supersilly society, modern law codes call that assault but in the old days it wasn’t.)
But If I use a racial epithat, while doing that it is a hate crime. Using a racial epithat is Hate Crime.
Racial epithats have always been used by every nation on earth since time immemorial. It was never a crime.
Now it is.
Now Jesus in the New Testament in the meeting with the Syro-Phonecian woman uses the term “dog” to obliquely refer to her. “Dog” is what Semitic people used to refer to Indo-Europeans who kept dogs. Was that a Hate crime?
English call French “frogs”, Germans “Krauts” and Japanese “Japs” or “Slant eyes”. And forever in European and American culture, Africans were referred as “n******”. Now, nobody was charged with a hate crime for some 200 years but after 1960, it is a hate crime to use the term “N*****’ .
What changed? This is preferential treatment? Was this Racialism? No.
It is about Marxists criminalizing racial prejudice and criminalizing human behavior that created metaphysical boundaries.
I am not talking about Turkish Law, or Chinese Law, but strictly Western Law. It is not in the Bible. Many things categorized as Hate crime is throughout the Bible and many times it is God who is doing it. If Western Law is partly based on Biblical injunctions, where did Hate Law come from?
What Hate Crime legislation is all about is social re-engineering for globalization. It is foreign. It is unjust and it attacks the Laws of Nature. Racial epithats have always been used, everywhere, at all times and now that is criminalized? No. It is not right.
9 Eric // Apr 30, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Is there ever a ‘love’ rape, is a bloody murder, any crime ever not motivated by rage and hate?
If there is a hate, there must be love in applying the laws equally, but not by creating two-tiers: one for the elites, the rulers and majority without the will power to research about the power of the grand jury to correct official crime masked by the ‘color’ of law, a situation where you or me loses our rights to speak freely and question corruption, that is wrong.
That is not “hate.” It is a love of the truth.
Red Beckman exposes the truth of real power of love of country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnkQ0H0xodk&feature=related
10 WLindsayWheeler // Apr 30, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Hate crimes are only for European males.
In Seattle recently, there were three separate murders and the perpetrators were all black. None of them were charged with hate crime.
“”Kristopher Kime, a 20-year-old white man who worked in construction and attended Highline Community College, came to the aid of a lone, petite, white woman on the ground being stomped by blacks. One of them, 18-year-old Jerell Thomas, came up behind him and smashed a bottle on the back of Kime’s head. Kime went down, and the pack stomped him.
Seattle’s Finest were assembled nearby, some on the ground, and some on rooftops, and could see the savagery, but were ordered to stand down because Chief Gil Kerlikowske didn’t want to stir up the rioters. When Kime’s friends telephoned 911 for help, the dispatchers refused to send officers into the riot to rescue him. He died that night in the hospital as his grief-stricken father looked on.
…. Seattle police eventually recommended that the Kime murder and other black-on-white attacks be treated as hate crimes, but the King County prosecutor made no hate crime charges.
Black Seattle preachers and community leaders were outraged–not by the racist violence–but because the media had dared to show that the perpetrators were black. Black preachers and the president of the Urban League, James Kelly, met with Mayor Paul Schell to demand that the media stop mentioning the riot’s racial character, calling complaints about black racism a “vilification of African Americans.” Chief Kerlikowske dutifully announced that race had had nothing to do with the race riot, and the media took the same line. Eventually, in a rare show of honesty, Chief Kerlikowske did admit that the attacks were racially motivated.”"
Hate crime legislation is ONLY targeting European males. It is not for Africans or Mexicans. Hate crime legislation is only targeting Christians. Christian preachers in Canada are being hauled into court for a hate crime when they preach the biblical injunction against homosexuality. Now, throughout Christendom, homosexuality was condemned, sermons preached against it. Now, under Marxist cultural hegemony of political correctness, Christians who speak out are arrested and charged with hate crimes. But socialists and homosexuals who charge into Catholic Churches in San Francisco while mass is going on to disrupt them are NOT charged with hate crimes.
Hate crimes are being used to protect Marxist pet victims and club their resistors. See, who gets to define “hate” is what matters. Hatred of Christianity and of Christians is not a crime. But when Christians preach against homosexuality, it is a crime.
For the rest of the article of the Seattle murders is here: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/013099.html CWCID Lawerence Auster at View from the Right
11 Lukobe // May 3, 2009 at 8:20 pm
Here’s Libby Purves’s take on hate-crime laws (from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article6216262.ece):
“I can think of nothing in the plethora of diktats about racial, sexist, ageist, religious or homophobic language that could not equally well be covered by a two-line ruling that all these — if serious — constitute insulting behaviour or harassment.”
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