As new legislation on hate crimes is wending its way through Congress, I figured I'd reflect on the subject of whether hate crimes deserve some additional disapprobation. I've thought various things at different times on this, and I suppose that, at the very least, the legislation is valuable at the very least as a statement of what we believe and what our moral values are. But I generally loathe the practice of legislating toward self-esteem, which is part of the reason why I don't think I could support the ERA if it came up again. I support women's equality and I'm something of a feminist, but the text of the ERA is merely an exercise in making a statement about who we are, and I'd rather use that political capital to pass specific laws to equalize pay and end discrimination.
One could claim that this sort of argument excludes gay marriage--why waste time debating it when you could just do civil unions and be done with it?--but my motives aren't merely expedient but purely practical. And gay marriage is not merely a statement about who we are--it's also that--but it is substantive progress on the progression of humanity.
So I find myself wondering which category hate crimes legislation falls under--is it just a statement, which I think I'd just as soon not bother with, or a step on the road of progress? I'm still not sure. I find it hard to believe that it would be an effective deterrent, for the same reason that the death penalty isn't an effective deterrent: the people who engage in these sorts of activities aren't thinking about what happens if they're caught. They're deeply sick people, whether due to actual illness or merely a lack of moral grounding. I do think it's good to keep people like that locked up for a long period of time, but should it be longer?
I guess the best thing I can come up with is that your garden-variety murderer's offense is that he violates the principle that every life is sacred and worth protecting. The hate criminal goes even further to say that an entire class of beings' lives are worthless. Even if he/she only commits the same crime as someone else, that seems like something important to note. The hate criminal presumably isn't targeting specific blacks or gays--any old one will do, because he/she hates them all. A murder over something like a drug deal, or a crime of passion, seems like something less evil to me because the targets are specific, and even though murder is wrong under any circumstances, these might not be crimes committed out of hatred toward a whole class of human beings. Killing someone someone because of a drug beef is callous, but it is merely a murder. Killing someone because they are different in a specific way seems more like an attempt at genocide on a smaller scale. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the legal definition of genocide is, but hate crimes feel closer like that than murder to me. And I think it's somewhat sensible to me to treat them in a legally harsher manner.
But I really don't know. It seems like a bad precedent to set. I don't really think there's a slippery slope on this issue leading invariably to people being taken from their homes for being uncool, but I do think there's reason for fear. It is political correctness, but this strikes me as the sort of thing political correctness exists for, rather than to delegitimize real debate. And I'm not a big fan of emphasizing motive when it comes to crime, for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's difficult to establish, to the extent that homicide detectives usually don't bother to try to establish it when solving a murder. I don't suppose someone with a history full of Stormfront hits and Confederate flags will have much wiggle room, but will they all be that easy? I'm guessing not. So, I suppose this leaves me on the side of hate crimes legislation, though I'm not particularly passionate about that support. I doubt that it will have a huge practical effect on crime, and it might well prove difficult to enforce, but I do think there's a palpable moral difference between regular murder and hate murder, for example, and I don't think it's unreasonable for the law to reflect that.
