Opinion
Hate Crimes Punish People's Thoughts
by Kathy Hart
Opinions Staff

I have heard many different people make several ill-considered arguments in favor of hate crimes legislation. While I don't agree with any of them, I can see with most of them where they are coming from and the logical processes by which they arrive at their conclusions.

People might judge hate crimes to be worse than other offenses because of the bigoted and discriminatory nature of the crimes' motivations, or because while the crime itself is usually against an individual, it has wider implications for the whole community which that individual represents.

I can appreciate the reasoning behind the position that people who commit hate crimes are more likely to be repeat offenders, and as such they should be more harshly sentenced, as a preventative measure.

I may disagree with the founding values of these arguments or think that there is a better resolution for the stated problem, but I accept them as legitimate alternative viewpoints. There is, however, one argument that I simply cannot fathom, and it goes something like this:

1. Prejudice and discrimination on arbitrary factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation and religion exist.
2. Sometimes such prejudices are expressed violently.
3. Such expression is bad and should be punished by the law.
4. To this end, specific hate crimes laws must exist.

The not-always-explicit-but-often-implied corollary to this "logical" progression is as if you do agree with point 4, you must be ignorant of or insensitive to all or part of the other points.

There is, however, another reason to reject this argument: because the final point is a non sequitur. It implies that these horrible acts of violence would never be punished without hate crimes legislation, but this is simply false.

Let us pretend for a moment that on Monday all hate crimes laws mysteriously vanish and are forgotten. Then, on Tuesday, I decide to go out and kill a man because I hate him for his ethnicity, or his religion, or sexual orientation. I could still face life in prison or even execution for what I did -- rightfully so, because what I did was wrong, dangerous, and despicable. If hate crimes laws were to be repealed, we would not be letting people walk free when they murder someone out of prejudicial hatred. We would be punishing them for murder.

So why does this argument conclude that specific laws are required for hate crimes? Because it is not the just the actions but the ideas, the actual motives behind the crime, that some people want to punish. The earlier stated argument is just a smoke screen, a way to avoid admitting that they want the courts to punish the thoughts of criminals as well as their actions. Worst of all, people may use such vague and disjointed arguments to avoid admitting this to themselves.

When confronted with the true nature of this argument, some proponents say that they don't want to punish people for having despicable thoughts, but for acting on these thoughts. They concede it would be obviously unrealistic and unethical to make it illegal to think anything, no matter how much we may object to the thought. But once that thought is acted upon, it becomes punishable, not just as an act but as a thought?

Even if we were to pretend that it was acceptable to punish the thought in addition to the crime, is not any thought or belief that is the genesis of violence just as bad as any other such thought? If a murder is precipitated by hatred borne of envy or greed, would the motive of such a murder not be just as punishable as that of any "hate crime"? Furthermore, are not mindsets such as these, when carried to a vicious extreme, just as detrimental to society and a dangerous to its citizens as any other mindset that might lead to violence?

So what hate crimes legislation really comes down to is an odd sort of discrimination. I do not mean that there is a discrimination as far as who is "protected" by hate crimes legislation. A hate crime against a heterosexual white male is still a hate crime and would still (in theory) be prosecuted as such. I mean to say there is a discrimination of motives. Why is racism a worse motive to kill someone than envy or personal hatred?

The only apparent reason is this: familiarity. We all have undoubtedly felt envy, had personal grudges, all the while feeling at least somewhat justified in having such feelings. We have probably even acted on such feelings, though not necessarily in a criminal way. We may not think such feelings to be good ones, but probably do not dwell on them as being particularly evil ones either. They are just a part of life, one that we accept and have to deal with.

Discriminatory feelings in the vein of racism seem to be a different matter. If we do feel such things from time to time, we are much more likely to recognize them as particularly evil and unworthy feelings. We would like to eliminate them from our society and ourselves. And so we do our best to distance ourselves from them.

And so some see fit to punish them whenever we are given tangible proof of their existence in others. They cannot just punish the manifestation of these bigotries, as they would for other sorts of motives, but they must punish the motives themselves.

Perhaps they believe that by punishing these undesirable thoughts, they will eliminate them from our society. Perhaps they think that they are simply sending a powerful message that prejudicial hatred will no longer be tolerated.

Regardless, they are showing the worst kind of intolerance, a different manifestation of the very mindset that they seek to punish. Hate crimes target people because of what they are, what they believe, and what feel. Hate crimes legislation, whatever its rationalizations or trappings, targets people for what they think. Both punish others for finding in them things that you would detest finding in yourself.

Both, in other words, persecute people for things that we all share, but upon which few of us actually act. Personally, I'd rather leave punishment and guilt for the criminals who commit the crimes in this country -- wouldn't you?

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:22:17 MST.