"Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid." – P. J. O'Rourke
I don't know about the last sentence in the above quote, but the first sentence sounds right. To illustrate Mr. O'Rourke's theory, the Senate is now taking up the perfectly insane issue of hate crime legislation, proposed, it goes without saying, by Democrats. The Dems want to add gay and transgendered people to the current list of hate crime victims. H.R. 1913, which has been named after Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was robbed and murdered in 1998, defines a hate crime as follows:
[A crime of violence that] is motivated by prejudice based on the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim, or is a violation of the State, local, or tribal hate crime laws.
The colossally stupid thing about hate crime legislation is that every single hate crime is already a crime without hate crime legislation. The murderers of the aforementioned Mr. Shepard are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Murder was already illegal. It's not like adding a 'hate crime' tag to their heinous acts changes anything. Hate crime legislation is completely superfluous.
Hate crime legislation doesn't serve as a deterrent to crime either. It's not like the murderers of Matthew Shepard would be willing to commit murder, but then would have said to themselves, 'hey, wait a minute, we don't want to get a murder rap AND a hate crime charge too. We better reconsider.'
Here are a couple perfectly insane quotes from leading Democrats about the current hate crime legislation being debated in Congress:
"I urge members on both sides of the aisle to act on this important civil rights issue by passing this legislation to protect all of our citizens from violent acts of intolerance." – Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA)
"No person should live in fear of violence because of who they are." – Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL)
Needless to say, passing hate crime legislation won't protect anyone from violence, nor will it stop people from living in fear because of who they are. What hate crime legislation is really about is granting special victim status to certain favored groups of people so that Democrats can say 'look what good people we Democrats are. We care about you. You should vote for us.' There is NO other purpose.
To show how inane and political hate crime legislation is, consider the case of James Byrd Jr., a black man from Texas who was brutally murdered in 1998 by three white men. They cut Byrd's throat and then chained him to the back of their truck and dragged him. This act was about as foul as it gets, and was racially motivated. The two men primarily responsible for murdering Byrd were sentenced to death. The third was given a life sentence. The Governor of Texas in 1998 was George W. Bush, who supported the death penalty for the two murderers.
Now we go to the year 2000, when George W. Bush was running for President. Many liberal groups, most notably the NAACP, made an issue of the Byrd case, and accused Bush of being a racist for not supporting hate crime legislation previously. Think about how insane that is. Here's Bush supporting the death penalty for Byrd's murderers, and the NAACP is calling Bush a racist at the same time. I mean, how much more harsh of a sentence could Bush have supported ? None. Maybe the NAACP wanted Byrd's murderers to be waterboarded before being executed, I don't know. As Dubya said at the time, "we don't need tougher laws." Bush was right. In Texas, the highest penalty for premeditated murder is death, with or without any hate crime legislation.
There are also constitutional issues with hate crime legislation, such as equal protection under the law. If I'm walking down the street and someone hits me in the head with a baseball bat, should there be a different sentence for the perpetrator based upon his race ? There shouldn't be. The person should be punished for the criminal act, not for his motivation, but hate crime legislation says yes, it matters whether your attacker is white or black. It matters what his motivation was. It doesn't, not really. I'd take it as a given that anyone who would hit me in the head with a baseball bat has some level of hatred in him, but it's the act that should be punished, and it should be punished equally, without consideration of race, religion, sexual orientation, hair color, sex, gender, how many tattoos he has, or whether or not he's has a health club membership. If the defendant's motivation is important, it can be considered at trial. We don't have to legislate it. When we start down the road of 'this victim deserves more consideration that that victim, and this perp deserves more of a sentence than that perp for the exact same crime,' we are losing our way. We are in fact discriminating against people when we do that, assigning them different levels of worth.
To further illustrate the silliness that starts when hate crime legislation is proposed, Republicans offered two amendments to H.R. 1913. The first was to exclude pedophiles from being protected under the "sexual orientation" part of the legislation. Democrats rejected that amendment UNANIMOUSLY. I guess pedophiles are a protected class now. The second amendment was to include veterans, the elderly, and Church pastors in the legislation. Democrats rejected that one too. That makes it 1) pedophiles protected, and 2) veterans not protected. Let's stop this nutty thought crime nonsense, please.
If Democrats really want to be the party of unity, as President Obama suggested, they could start by not constantly dividing everyone into competing special interest groups. They could start by uniting us all into one group, Americans, and then pass legislation accordingly.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Kind of clueless.
Let's take a southern state as an example. You pick it…could be any red, hate-Obama state. White crackers in authority, with white juries and white judges can, and have, allowed race-based crimes by whites against blacks, to go by with minimal sentencing. Not in all cases, mind you, but in some.
Hate crime legislation allows for the feds to rectify these unjust race-based decisions.
The same could be said about hate crimes against gays. Especially, today, this is prescient. Communities who rally themselves around hate of the "other", can 'protect' anti-gay criminals, by reducing sentences, etc. The hate crimes legislation would prevent this from happening.
Were Nazi crimes against Jews and gypsies hate-crimes, do you think? Anything unusual about the crimes Nazis committed? Or were they simply detached-from-hate run of the mill crimes?
Seems the Rev is living in 1940. The rest of us are here in 2009. I'm not following how the USA is like Nazi Germany either. Straw men arguments, one and all.
As I stated, the murderers of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. received the maximum penalties allowable under the law (and in the Byrd case, the death penalty was handed down in a southern state ! Must have been a miracle). No jury was about to let the perpetrators of those horrible acts go because they (according to you) hate gays and/or blacks.
And have you ever heard of double jeopardy ? It's supposed to be against the law. Federal hate crime legislation subverts that principle.
We prosecuted those Nazis too, and we somehow managed to do it WITHOUT hate crime legislation. Gee, I wonder how that happened ?
The only racist sentiment thus far has come from you, when you called all southerners "white crackers." Go wash your brain out with soap.
Those new Mexican neighbors have got the Reverend hating everybody. I'm not sure if it's loud music or what.
"Let's take a southern state as an example. You pick it…could be any red, hate-Obama state."
Could you be more ignorant and stereotypical? The south is no longer the south of the 1960's. Obama carried Virginia and North Carolina. So I pick those two states. Please provide examples.
a Judge in New York found a man quilty of a hate crime when he contacted a gay man on line and arranged to go to that man's aprt. to have sex. Once there he beat the gay and robbed him. He was found quilty of a hate crime.
Who could argue that decision? The lawyer of the defendant objected. Why? Because the defendant was also gay. The only conclusion one can draw is that it is not the motivation behind the act that matters but rather certain groups are entitled to special rights under the law. The real motivation for the hate crime bills is not to punish hate but rather to provide the Fed. Gov. another tool to engage in social enginerring advancing their prioities at the time and also to usurp more power from the local level.
I want that legislation to include fat people and bald people. Thin people with hair have no idea when they call these people names the damage it does to their self esteem. Also when fat people are limited to the number of times they can go up to the buffet and the extra money they have to pay for a plane ticket this is discrimiination. To me name calling names and discrimination are the same as hate crimes. Also Rev I hope you are white when throwing around that word "cracker". This is a white only word. That word alone is a hate word, it is not one of endearment.
King and Angry you are right on the money with these 2 statements.
"The real motivation for the hate crime bills is not to punish hate but rather to provide the Fed. Gov. another tool to engage in social enginerring advancing their prioities at the time and also to usurp more power from the local level."
"What hate crime legislation is really about is granting special victim status to certain favored groups of people so that Democrats can say 'look what good people we Democrats are. We care about you. You should vote for us.' There is NO other purpose."
Rev, sometimes it's better to just sit back and smile at what is written than to make comments like you did. This is 2009. Didn't you watch the OJ trial?
The OJ case is a good example of the stupidity and bigotry of hate crime laws. OJ hated his ex-wife. That was his motivation. Race had nothing to do with him killing her, but hate sure did. Without it, no way does he murder her. Yet, because Nicole and Ron Goldman weren't a "protected" class – no hate crime charge.
"it is time to stop splitting people into groups. All hate crimes do is support the idea that blacks are different from whites, that homosexuals need to be treated differently from non-homos, that we aren't the same." – Stan Marsh
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151849?videoId=151849
dd20 – Amazing the sense Southpark makes sometimes, isn't it. LOL I live that show.
Darn. Here I went and wrote all those words about hate crime legislation, when all I had to do was link to that South Park clip. I could have saved so much time.
Thanks dd.
King, no kidding if you don't watch it, start. Makes way more sense than olberdork and madcow. Sometimes it's political sometime it's not but it always has a message and the writers are brilliant.
joe, I wasn't being sarcastic to dd20. I meant what I said. That South Park clip did sum up the savage hypocrisy of hate crime legislation.
I'm a big South Park fan. And I'm pretty sure Trey Parker is a Libertarian.
http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/trey-parker.html
So, when white crackers were letting other whites lynch blacks, those were not hate-crimes? And the feds have no right telling those white crackers how to prosecute crimes against blacks? Is that your position?
And, would someone answer me about the Nazi/Jews thing? Take the war part out for a moment…….Germans targeting Jews for extinction, was that a hate-crime, ya' think?
And, someone needs to explain to me how passing hate-crime legislation "grants special victim status". What the heck does that even mean?
Rev,
It's like you can't read. Either that or you can't comprehend what you're reading. Which is it ?
I'll talk real slow.
T-H-E Y-E-A-R I-S 2-0-0-9. L-Y-N-C-H-I-N-G B-L-A-C-K-S O-R G-A-Y-S I-S M-U-R-D-E-R. T-H-A-T I-S A H-E-I-N-O-U-S C-R-I-M-E, P-U-N-I-S-H-A-B-L-E B-Y L-I-F-E I-N P-R-I-S-O-N O-R T-H-E D-E-A-T-H P-E-N-A-L-T-Y.
W-E P-R-O-S-E-C-U-T-E-D T-H-E N-A-Z-I-S.
All you can see is that certain forms of bigotry exist. Yes, they do, and they probably always will. What you won't see, is that we already have laws against every crime that is classified as a hate crime, and therefore don't need hate crime legislation. Not at all. It's about politics, period. It's not about anyone's safety. It's not about anyone's fear. It's not about civil rights. It's about politics, and hate crime legislation is discriminatory in itself, because it assigns different levels of worth to different groups.
If a gay person is protected under hate crime legislation, and a straight person is not, or a veteran is not, or a Christian is not, or a Muslim is not, or a Boy Scout is not, or a teacher is not, etc, etc, etc, that assigns special victim status to the gay and makes a crime against a gay more severe than the same crime against someone else. That makes gays a protected class, worth more than others.
That's your last explanation. You can decide to comprehend or not.
I realize that our minds are tuned to different frequencies, but as far as I can see, the hate-crime legislation is to punish the perpetrator. How does that really grant "special victim status", if, say, the person is dead? How the hell does that work?
Let me ask you this. If black criminals were specifically targeting white people in a city whose entirely black police force and black district attorney were turning their collective heads away from acknowledging what it was…..a kind of genocidal hate crime spree….charges get reduced, etc….should the feds have the power to step in to prevent the injustice from continuing?