by moc
At a meeting of gay and gay-friendly progressives the other night, I heard a nice young gay man wonder why we need hate crimes legislation. Hate is hate and crimes are crimes, and why combine the two? He implied that he thinks that seeking hate-crime legislation makes us seem like whiney-babies asking for our mommies to take care of us.
So I’ve been thinking about it: Hmm. Whiney babies. Would that be maybe – Emmett Till, who was mutilated, lynched, and burned for no other reason than he was a young black man who possibly said “hi” to a white woman? Or… James Byrd, who fifty years later was dragged through the streets of Jasper Texas until he was decapitated, for no other reason than he was a black man alone on a country road? Or Matthew Shephard, who was hung from a North Dakota fence to die, for no other reason than he was gay and trusting?
Now, it is true that murder is murder, and a vicious murder will, these days, be tried as such, with a nice vicious penalty applied, whether it is designated a hate crime or not. I think this was our nice young man’s point. However, the reason that murders of this sort must be specifically identified as crimes of hate is to allow our leaders, both secular and religious, to lead us all in a spirited denunciation of the attitudes that engendered them.
Far more numerous than hate murders are the racist graffiti, the swastikas painted on synagogue walls, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, the beatings nearly unto death of interracial couples and homosexuals, and on and on; and it is for this kind of activity that the enhanced punishment accorded by hate crimes statutes is intended. Vandalism intended to intimidate an entire group of people should carry a higher penalty than overturning trash cans on Halloween. Violence intended to spark fear in the hearts of an entire group of people, intended to dampen a group’s feeling of being at home in their own country and in their own skin, is a great crime and should be acknowledged and treated as such.
Hate crimes are, purely and simply, a form of terrorism. They are used to intimidate an entire class of people, and they are very effective. As an editorial in the Washington Post in May of this year said,“…crimes that target someone because of his or her race or sexual orientation are more than an offense against that individual. They are crimes that terrorize whole communities.”
I’ll close with a quote and a couple of questions. The quote is from the website of an organization not usually considered wimpy, sissy, or whiney: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (www.fbi.gov). “Crimes of hatred and prejudice—from lynchings to cross burnings to vandalism of synagogues—are a sad fact of American history, but the term “hate crime” did not enter the nation’s vocabulary until the 1980s, when emerging hate groups like the Skinheads launched a wave of bias-related crime. The FBI began investigating what we now call hate crimes as far back as the early 1920s, when we opened our first Ku Klux Klan case. Today, we remain dedicated to working with state and local authorities to prevent these crimes and to bring to justice those who commit them.”
The questions: Seeing as there already exist Hate Crime laws at the Federal level and in most states, including Oklahoma; and that they usually cover, at a minimum, race, color, religion, ancestry, and national origin; and considering that anti-gay hate crimes make up about one third of all reported hate crimes, why on earth would we not want to add sexual and gender orientation to these laws? And, how on earth does doing this make us whiney-babies?