R EMEMBER the old newspaper comic strip that complained, “There Oughta Be a Law”? That seems to be the thinking on both sides of the political aisle when it comes to “hate crimes.”
No, it won’t do a thing about eliminating racial or religious prejudice from society. But there oughta be a law anyway.
That kind of feelgood thinking was running rampant in Albany last week, and not just from the usual suspects. Spurred on by Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver, the state Assembly, by a 113-31 vote, approved a comprehensive bill that would actually create a new crime, called bias-related violence or intimidation.
Under this law, crimes committed on the basis of a victim’s race, creed, color, national origin, sex, disability, age or sexual orientation (have we left anyone out?) would in and of themselves be class C or D penalties, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The bill now goes to the Senate, where GOP leader Joe Bruno – at the urging of Gov. Pataki and former Sen. Al D’Amato – is rethinking his previous opposition. As for the governor, he included a call for state hate-crime legislation in his State of the State Address.
There are honorable reasons to oppose such bills, such as worries that hate-crime legislation is a dangerous form of government-sanctioned thought control. But opponents face the problem of being automatically accused of excusing crimes of prejudice – or at least not taking them seriously.
But do such laws – no matter how tough – really accomplish something useful, other than allowing legislators and political advocacy groups to pat each other on the back?
After all, they don’t criminalize anything that isn’t already against the law. The people out in Wyoming who allegedly pistol-whipped Matthew Shepard, a gay man, tied him to a fence in freezing weather and left him to die have been charged with murder and face the death penalty. The same is true for the Texans who tied James Byrd to the back of a truck and ripped him to pieces by dragging him along a road.
Would either set of killers have been deterred by the added sanctions of a hate-crime law? Hardly – how much more can they be punished than with a lethal injection? (Oddly, many of those who insist that hate-crime laws deter haters are the most vocal in denying that capital punishment can deter murderers.)
Hate-crimes laws have three serious problems: First, they do little more than criminalize a perpetrator’s state of mind – thinking hateful thoughts becomes a crime, if you act on it. Second, they foster the culture of universal victimization and, moreover, create a special class of victim.
And third, they declare that crimes motivated by bigotry are worse than those motivated by greed. Which means that, while scrawling an obscenity on someone’s house might get you 30 days for vandalism, if you draw a swastika instead, you face 15 years for a hate crime.
And what is a hate crime, anyway? There is an automatic assumption that whenever the victim is a member of one of those protected classes and the perpetrator is not, it’s a hate crime – even if there’s no evidence of prejudice involved.
In an op-ed piece in USA Today, Bill Cosby’s wife, Camille, pronounced the murder of their son, Ennis, a hate crime (one for which, she declared, America was responsible) – even though every shred of evidence indicated it was a robbery gone bad, with no racial motive.
The problem with hate-crime laws is that they’re blatantly political – they’re meant to make a point rather than to address a real criminal-justice need. Which means that the potential for widespread abuse is inherent.
How soon before we start hearing that every rape – which, we’re told, is not a crime of passion, but of power – is actually a hate crime, because the victims are all targeted because they’re women?
The notion is not so far-fetched: Leading Muslim groups have already declared that the arrest and trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, spiritual leader of the World Trade Center bomb plot, was “a hate crime.” Gay playwright Tony Kushner has publicly blamed everyone from Sen. Trent Lott to Pope John Paul II for Shepard’s death.
In fact, for all the publicity of the Shepard and Byrd cases, they remain extremely rare exceptions. The most recent FBI statistics, released last week, show that the vast majority – 65 percent – of officially designated hate-crime incidents in 1997 were either private property vandalism or “intimidation.”
Making disparaging comments about someone’s ethnicity is hateful and stupid – but should it also be criminal? Do advocates of hate-crime laws really believe that we can legislate bigotry out of business?
Real crimes of hate – and, yes, the motives behind them – deserve universal condemnation. What they don’t deserve, however, are laws that will do absolutely nothing to prevent another Matthew Shepard from being beaten to death.
But everyone feels the need to “do something” about hate, real or imagined. And in a political climate of over-extended sensitivity, too many of those in public life who should know better – liberals and conservatives alike – have been intimidated into silence.
