Hate Crimes

[rurudyne]

I believe that Hate Crime legislation is wrong.

There are, of course, different level of this wrongness (like granting a state new police powers for one), but I think this time short and sweet may best suffice to start a conversation.

Intent and methodology have always been taken into account for the sort of crime or severity punishment. Someone who sets out to inflict some injury to a person or their property or their interest or their good name has always been judged harsher than someone who accidentally or carelessly causes same.

Motivation, of which hatred is one sort, has always been a matter to help determine if a person is guilty or not.

However, motivation has not been (at least in America or, to my knowledge, England) a basis for either the sort of crime or a cause for severity of punishment EXCEPT as a mitigating factor to lessen these. By which I mean that if a motivation in a given instance has some measure of social approval it has been seen as a basis for lessening the charges and/or punishments.

But what "hate crimes" laws seek to do is a real novelty, for it seeks to make unpopular motives the basis for greater crimes and harsher punishments whereas in the past these have not had such improper importance as they are being granted now.

In the end, anything that is sufficiently unpopular will become the basis for this sort of injustice.

Letting go of the podium now.

[mewshkin]

No takers? OK, I'll bite...

Is a "hate crime" actually a legal category, or a popular one? Genuine plea for information there, I don't know an awful lot about law. I'm not even precisely sure how hate crime legislation is framed in the UK, let alone the US. In the best spirit of internet boors I'll plough on regardless.
I do reckon though that public 'disapproval' of hatred is more well grounded than a mere emotional beauty contest. Its not like theres a slippery slope here. Once you've got to hatred, theres not much further down to go ("What are they going to ban next? Pure, undiluted evil?")

Anyway. Thats all nonsense.

All "hate crimes" are defined as attacks against groups, no? An attack upon a black person, a lesbian, a group of hare krishnas, is seen as an attack upon all blacks, lesbians or hare krishnas if it can be established that the motivation for the attack was hatred of that group rather than just of the person(s) attacked. My murdering my neighbour because I fucking hate the bastard is not defined as a hate crime. My murdering my neighbour because he's chinese and I hate the chinese, is defined as a hate crime. What raw emotion motivated you to kill is not the issue. Rather it is a hateful concept, that of a deindividuated, dehumanised victim, reduced to a mere stereotype in the mind of the offender.

Now, a system of law cannot protect people against being regarded only as a part of a mass, a group hated or otherwise, if it makes itself willfully blind to such distinctions in the minds of villains, and such protection is a worthy aim of law IMO.

In short, it is the crime that denies the individuality (and therefore the dignity and humanity) of the victim, not the judgement of criminality.

[rurudyne]

mewshkin, a good take.

But the dehumanizing effect goes both ways. Because it becomes difficult to say that someone who may "hate" a group really doesn't "hate" that group, you end up reaching the point that all crimes against persons who are members of groups that the authorities deem to be subject to hate crimes are legally viewed as hate crimes. It's a simple matter of understanding how prosecutors do their thing ... why stop when there's more Fritos in the bag?

The end result is that instead of addressing dehumanization of persons at the hands of persons, the state legally dehumanizes them as a matter of prosecuteorial zeal in coming to their aid as groups, or entities that are abstractions of persons, rather than persons. In short order you see people acting is all crimes against "X" are racially or even politically motivated.

Either way someone is being treated as a mere component of a larger abstract entity. It's all a matter of who or what is doing it and your attitude as to which is more tolerable.

For my own part: at least when a jerk hates his neighbor he doesn't do it as a matter of law. No new police powers have been granted to the state, nor new punishments defined, nor new toys for prosecutors to play with.