I think so-called "hate crime" laws are stupid. A murderer/rapist/thief shouldn't be punished any more or less severely because he was a racist or sexist. It's not illegal to be racist or sexist, so it doesn't make any sense to punish people more severely for criminal actions that stem from those motivations. Further, aren't all crimes "hate crimes" in a sense? If the offender doesn't hate the victim because of his race or gender, then there's generally some other reason. And if not, are crimes with randomly selected victims somehow less horrible?
And that's why I'm not a fan of genocide charges, such as are likely to be brought against Saddam Hussein. I don't care if most of his victims were of one ethnicity or religion, and I don't see why that's relevant. What's important is that he murdered hundreds of thousands -- even millions -- of people, all of whom have worth as individuals, not merely because they fit into some group or another. Would Saddam's crimes have been less atrocious if he had murdered without regard for race, religion, or gender? Not at all.
His motivation may have been to kill Shi'ites, Kurds, women, Jews, and so forth, but the actual crimes of which he is guilty are simple: countless individual acts of murder, rape, and torture. If he needs to be charged with some large over-arching crime, call it mass-murder, not genocide. But they should name as many specific victims as possible and create an accurate record of his offenses against real live human beings, not ethnic groups.
Update:
Commenter Cob writes:
After all if someone spray paints a building, what's the big deal? Is there no difference in degree if someone draws a swastika on a synagogue or write's 'kilroy was here' on a subway train?No, there should be no legal difference. Don't use "of course" to try to score rhetorical points by assuming we're in agreement when we're not. The only difference may be that a synagogue is likely private property, whereas a subway train is likely public property. (There may be a moral difference, but we're not talking about morality here, we're talking about what types of laws are good policy. All laws should be viewpoint-neutral.)Of course there is a difference and the difference is real and significant.
Update:
Eugene Volokh on hate crime laws.
The difference between a regular crime and a hate crime is a difference of degree rather like that between a military engagement and a terrorist act. In fact, the very reason we rightly abhor terrorism is because it is calculated to 'send a message' in a violent way.
Such is the motivation of the perpetrator of a hate crime. After all if someone spray paints a building, what's the big deal? Is there no difference in degree if someone draws a swastika on a synagogue or write's 'kilroy was here' on a subway train?
Of course there is a difference and the difference is real and significant. We have been asking juries to determine motive in murder trials for hundreds of years. There is nothing special about having them determine the proximate cause of animus for hate crimes. Nothing except for the political intransigence of a thoughtless few.
C: That's not why I abhor terrorism. I abhor it because murder and kidnapping are wrong. That a particular terrorist act is or is not designed to "carry a message" is irrelevant to me.
There is no difference in degree between someone painting a swastika on a synagogue and someone writing "kilroy was here" on a subway train (excepting differences due to the private/public nature of the two properties). Don't say "of course", because I don't agree at all, and that is in fact the source of my entire point.
I would agree that the grafitti isn't the difference. I do draw one disctinction, though. If the swastika was intended (and we into the mens rae area here) to be a threat, then that is a degree higher -- it becomes assault. I do want to point out, though, that it isn't the thought behind it that is criminalized -- it is the threat. If you paint a sawstika on a synagogue, then I could see that as a threat (although I would be much more comfortable with making that claim against "DIE JOO DIE"), while something like wearing a swastika yourself wouldn't climb to that degree.
And ethnicity or creed has nothing to do with it. "DIE PHELPS" on the outside of my house should be treated as an assault the same way.
There is a huge difference between drawing a swastika on a synagogue and writing "Kilroy was here" on a supermarket. If you can't see the difference, I question whether you are even trying to.
Phelps: Good point regarding threats. I agree.
X: Please explain the difference. Do you think that laws should be viewpoint-neutral, or not? Should a person who hates Jews and robs a Jewish-owned bank be punished more severely than a non-antisemitic bank robber? What if he hates Jews, but doesn't know the bank is Jewish-owned? Where do you draw the lines? Who decides what "hates" are worth extra punishment, and how much "hate" do you have to have in order for it to be punishable? If I just mildly dislike someone's race, but that dislike gives me enough of a preference for them as a victim over someone else, is that enough for a "hate crime"?
It's all subjective and ad-hoc. Such things have no place in a just system.
If you really can't tell the difference between Kilroy and the swastika, ask any Jew which he'd rather have painted on the side of his house. If your theory is right, he won't care. If mine is, he will.
When it comes to crime, I think viewpoint neutrality is overrated. There's a good reason why vandalism with the message "I want to kill you and everyone who looks like you" gets treated differently from vandalism whose only message is "I'm an idiot who likes to draw on other people's walls." The former is a threat, the latter, a mere annoyance. And to the extent that ethnicity is the motive, it's also an implied threat to everyone else in the community who happens to share that trait.
The only kind of neutrality that is necessary, or IMO desirable, is that all ethnicities be protected in the same way.
Yes, the bastard who's trying to steal money AND run all Jews out of town should be punished more severely than the bastard who is only trying to steal the money.
Then it's not a hate crime. Even if he does know the bank is Jewish owned, it's still not a hate crime unless that was the motive.
Like everything else, it depends on what the jury finds.
The Legislature. Who else?
Possibly, but at some point the jury's going to question whether the crime was primarily motivated by racism, or whether the racism is not a red herring. Either way, it's not going to make him appear very sympathetic in the eyes of a jury. Oh well.
X: Yeah, the legislature, fine, but how in the world can a jury make objective determinations of the facts in cases like this? It's impossible.
Further, I don't think it should be done. I don't care how offended a person is by grafitti. The crime isn't in the offensiveness of the message that's written, it's in the fact that private (or public) property is degraded and damaged.
I don't know how many times I can repeat this, but it's not illegal to hate people or to want them run out of town, as long as you do it legally. Vandalism is illegal because it violates property rights, period. The government has no right to say that that the views of someone who hates Jews are worse than the views of someone who hates milk. The government can't make those judgements. We as individuals certainly should, and we should disassociate ourselves from anti-semites more than other vandals, but the government shouldn't be involved in that at all.
"Hate crime" laws create "thought crimes".
The trouble with punishing hatred against a given group is that you have to pick the groups that must be protected from hate. Suppose that a Jew writes something nasty on the house of a former Nazi. Is it OK to hate Nazis but not Jews?
If you say yes, then you need some way to determine which groups deserve protection. Can we hate former communists? Convicted child molesters who have served their time and been freed from prison? Enviro-terrorists?
Does it have to be group hatred? Should it be illegal to hate Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore? If it's OK to hate individuals but not groups, then how big does a group have to be before it merits protection?
Is it OK to hate the haters? (This seems to be the point of hate crime laws: punishing certain hateful people.) If so, how far does the principle extend? Suppose that A hates Armenians, and B hates A for hating Armenians. Is A now allowed to counter-hate back at B? Can C hate both for their mutual hatred?
The flawed assumption here is that good people don't hate. In reality, everyone hates, and they should hate. To be good, you must hate evil.
The question for hate crime laws is which hatreds will be stigmatized, which will be ignored, and which will be enshrined as morally good (e.g. hatred of jew-haters). Sorting out hatreds like that is a very dangerous undertaking.
Why on earth not? Government makes value judgments all the time. That's part of their job, as elected officials. The only issue on which government is not allowed to take a side is religion, based on the Establishment Clause.
BB: Great explanation, thanks.
X: And hating Jews isn't a matter of religion? &c.
It would be, if the hate crime law applied to certain religions but not others, or if a serious issue arose as to what is or isn't a religion. Substitute race for religion if that makes the argument cleaner; the basic issue is the same.
As to BB's counter-example, it doesn't work. Ethnicities are protected; haters are not. Jews who commit crimes individuals who hate Jews are not guilty of a hate crime. Jews who commit crimes targeting Arabs are, even if their sole motive for hating all Arabs is the fact that many Arabs hate them. Individual vs. group punishment, if you will.
X: Forty years ago you might have reasonably claimed that all ethnicities would be protected equally. Except that you know that they won't be, no more than laws against racial discrimination protect whites and asians. In fact, I seem to recall a demonstration a few years ago that the few state hate crime laws on the books are already being applied unevenly on the assumption that only whites can be racist.
Hate crime laws really boil down to a denial of the age-old idea that everyone should be equal before the law. They divide citizens into Good People and Bad People, and mete out different punishments for the same actions. History amply demonstrates that this categorization wouldn't stay confined to race for long. It would quickly pick up sex, then disability, then gender, and then sexual orientation, in the same direction as laws against discrimination. And it would also quickly expand from longer sentences for crimes to criminalizing anything that makes a protected group uncomfortable.
Does that sound outrageous? Consider: As of April 29, 2004, it is a crime in Canada to make public statements that could incite hatred against homosexuals. Judges are authorized to seize any publication for which there are reasonable grounds for believing contains such statements. The basic statute is here except they added "sexual orientation to section 318(4).
A man has already been fined for publicly pointing out that the Bible forbids homosexuality. (I think that his conviction was under provincial law, and the national law is the recent news.)
Even aside from the slippery slope considerations, I think our laws should be blind to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. Group membership should be meaningless in the eyes of the law (even conspiracies require actual agreement and acts in furtherance, not mere membership in a group).
Hating a person or a group isn't illegal, and motivation shouldn't have a role in sentencing (except perhaps in reducing a sentence) (although it can certainly be useful for proving guilt).
Viewpoint criminalization isn't limited to Canada, of course. John Derbyshire's latest column includes the following from an acquaintance of his living in France:
"On the TV news of Wednesday night, they presented a conference about 'hate speech' on the Internet. They took as example the police in action against a 'hate web site.' The only thing I could read on the web page they were showing was "...against the Islamization of Europe..." Indeed, according to the law, to be against the Islamization of Europe is racism... and forbidden. France not only doesn't recognize there is a war, it forbids by law to say there is a war..."
Conservatives have a real advantage in these social policy matters in the fact that Canada and Western Europe are so much farther down the slippery slope than America. We often don't need to speculate about the consequences of more liberalism; we can simply point to current events in countries that have already tried it.
The slope isn't that slippery, Ben. Freedom of expression is constitutionally protected in the US to an extent it has never been in Canada, France, or almost anywhere else. In those countries, expressing hate is itself a crime. Here, it's just a factor in judging the gravity of an act which constitutes a crime in its own right.
X: How can you say that the slope isn't slippery when we've already watched others slide down it?
We also disagree on a point of logic. You say that we have freedom of expression in this country, and hate crime laws would merely make that expression "just a factor in judging the gravity of an act which constitutes a crime in its own right."
Let's suppose that you are free to wear red shirts. I don't like people who wear red shirts, so I pass a law that doubles traffic fines for anyone driving while wearing a red shirt. After that law is passed, are you still really free to wear a red shirt?
I don't think so. If you disagree, then reconsider the hypothetical with traffic fines multiplied by ten for those in red shirts. Lifetime imprisonment for illegally parking while wearing a red shirt. The death penalty for speeding while wearing a red shirt.
If X increases your sentence in a criminal case, then you are not free to engage in X.
We haven't. They were at the bottom of the hill from the beginning. Even back in the colonial days, when our slogan was "don't tread on me," theirs was "f*** me harder, please."
Your hypothetical is interesting, but not necessarily relevant. At some point, we get a "wag the dog" problem, but we don't have that with the hate crime laws that exist in the U.S.