Ethics

"Hate crime" laws try to criminalize thought and speech

John D. Altevogt

From the Kansas City Star, November 4 '98.
Following on from the Shephard murder, there were calls to make it more criminal to act on some prejudices. A noted lawyer thinks this stinks.
 

 

How ludicrous that people want to peer into the minds of anyone who pistol-whips someone savagely and leaves him to die, tied to a post.

We've recently had two crimes in the Kansas City area that got quite a bit of attention from the local media.

In Kansas City a 60-year-old mentally disabled man was brutally beaten and robbed of the $2 he made scavenging pop cans.

In Kansas City, Kan., a carload of youths calmly waited for a 10-year-old girl to walk across the street before gunning her down.

Kansas City can be proud that nobody has accused the perpetrators of hating the victims. Certainly this must be a relief to the families of the victims knowing that their loved ones were not attacked by hatemongers.

Indeed, these families must feel doubly blessed that the perpetrators appear to be members of an oppressed minority undoubtedly reacting to the outrages of a heartless Republican-dominated Congress.

How, farcical, how ludicrous it is that people would want to peer into the minds of anyone low enough to gun down a 10-year-old, mug a helpless old man, jealously slit the throats of two defenseless people or pistol-whip someone savagely and then leave him to die, tied to a post.

Who cares what, if any, thought processes motivated such depraved, mindless stupidity? The acts speaks for themselves and should be punished with indifference to the social status of perpetrator or victim.

The problem isn't assessing motivation; it's trying to get a conviction out of these same paramours of permissiveness. Remember one of the Menendez boys? Shot ol' mom with a shotgun, walked outside, calmly reloaded, went back in and blew her face off. The first jury gave this guy a pass because he looked so cute in a sweater. After all, he admitted he had done wrong and even shed a tear or two on the stand. What a nice boy!

Incredibly, 40 states have actually enacted "hate crime" laws, statutes that criminalize thought. Stranger yet is that much of the media coverage of the Matthew Shepard case bemoaned the fact that there were still 10 states left that had not so afflicted their citizens.

 

The acts speaks for themselves and should be punished with indifference to the social status of perpetrator or victim.

The reality is that the drive to establish hate crimes is itself motivated by hatred and a desire to silence any critic of the latest in totalitarian liberal ideology.

Once one establishes that the principle that acts motivated by certain types of thought are worse than acts not so motivated, it is a short step to deter such crimes by prohibiting any outward expression of the thoughts that might lead to such acts.

We now see story after story trying to blame the entire pro-life movement for the murder of an abortion doctor in New York. This follows on the heels of similar stories that tried to connect the ads from religious groups offering counseling to homosexuals with the assault on Shepard in Wyoming.

Wanna bet that those young buckaroos in Wyoming spent far more time watching "Jerry Springer" than looking at ads discussing homosexuality.

In fact, the beating of Shepard, a gay man, is the cultural epitome of these shows; if someone disagrees with you, attack!

Even though this was similar to the murder of a homosexual after the taping of a Jenny Jones show, the message from media liberals was clear: Stop all messages that question abortion and the homosexual lifestyle and you stop the violence.

If you think I've overstated the attempt to equate hatred with conservative thought read the words of Rev. John J. Barfield III, chairman of the National Black Clergy Network:

"The new code word for hating blacks is conservatism ... It's simple: If you are a conservative, you hate progress and black people, and if you are a liberal, you love all people and want progress."

Apparently the category of "conservative" people lies outside the category of "all" people in Barfield's warped logic.

 

Related:
hate makes a poor counsellor

Barfield's equation of conservative thought with hatred and racism is just an inversion of the National Organization for Women's pass on crimes alleged against Bill Clinton.

NOW appears to be saying: "Hey, he may be the first president to put the White House on the national registry for Megan's Law, but he thinks our way." The message is indeed simple: If they're liberal they're innocent, if they're conservative, get a rope.

Establishing "hate crimes" is just another step in totalitarian liberalism's attempt to control and censor speech patterns that don't fit in with their distorted culture of death and decay. If they really care about deterring crime, let them step up and admit that there are "acts" that are wrong, each time, every time, all of the time.


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