Hate is Not a Crime

Captain Ed links to a number of reports about a story out of Florida involving two 16 year old girls, an anti-gay flier and charges of hate crimes:

A Florida teenager has been denied bail until her trial for perpetrating a hate crime. The unidentified girl and a friend distributed a flier at school attacking homosexuality and pointed out at least one classmate as gay, which caused police to arrest the pair for disturbing the peace and charging them with a felony hate crime (via CQ commenter brainy435):

A pair of 16-year-old girls face hate crime charges after they allegedly handed out anti-gay fliers targeting a classmate at their northern Illinois high school.
The girls were arrested May 11 after handing out fliers in the parking lot of Crystal Lake South High School that depict a male student kissing another boy and contain hateful language about gays.

Officials say the fliers targeted a male classmate, who is also a neighbor of the girls. The two girls had apparently been feuding with the boy.

Earlier today, a judge rejected bond for one of the girls, citing her home environment and already lengthy juvenile record — 13 run-ins with the cops. Instead of home detention, the girl will be held at the Kane County Juvenile Justice Center while the case is pending, according to the Daily Herald.

None of the media reports to which I've linked tell much about the actual content of the flier. Fox gets a little more specific in its description of "hateful language about gays," but none of them mention any specific threat. The charges arrayed against the girls don't involve a threat of violence, so presumably the flier just contained stupid, hateful insults towards gays in general and at least one student in particular.

If that's the case, then I don't see an actual criminal act. I do see an opportunity for civil tort action against the girls and their parents, as well as the school, on behalf of the student they humiliated in the flier. Otherwise, it isn't a crime to insult people -- and that's a good thing, too, because 75% of the blogosphere would have to surrender to the police.

This is the problem with hate-crime legislation -- and perhaps with terrorist legislation as well, as I noted in my earlier post about Jonathan Paul. Both of them specifically criminalize motive, rather than leave them as a component of an objective crime itself. Beating up a gay person should carry the same penalties whether hate motivated it or not. Similarly, terrorism as a civil crime (ie, not in the context of foreigners attacking the US) also creates a thought-police mentality that is pretty seductive to people determined to stamp out evil -- in their subjective opinion of it.(links in originial omitted)

Hate crimes represents a fairly stupid category of criminal behavior. First, it assumes a certain mentality in the perpetrator based upon characteristics of the victim. In the example above that Captain Ed uses, if a two men beat up a third to rob him of his money, the fact that the victim is gay will create a hate crime, even if the victim is a complete stranger to the assailants!!

But itnerestingly, if two gay men beat up a straight man, they cannot be charged with a hate crime, even if the two gay men "hate" straight men. Because hatred of the majority is not a crime, only hatred of minorities.

Hate crime classifications are a result of a quest for more "protections" for minorities. In reality, these protections are actually more rights than anyone else. If you harbor ill will to any "protected" group, the logical extension of hate crimes legislation is the criminalization of your thoughts.