The Stupidity of Hate Crimes Laws

The House recently passed the Local Law Enfocement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would make it a federal crime to "willfully cause bodily injury" because of the victim's race, color, religion, national origin, "actual or perceived" sexual orientation, gender identity, gender, or disability.

So what we have is a politically correct addendum to state laws that already cirminalize the willful infliction of bodily harm--called battery in most states. But because the victim is a member of a "preferred" class, the criminal act will be punished as both a state criminal act and a federal "hate crime." Stuart Taylor, after pairing some very heinous crimes together, notes the double standards that have been previously applied and then writes of the bill:

One reason for the double standards at work in these cases may be that many journalists, interest groups, and academics assume (incorrectly, in my view) that it would fan the flames of white racism and homophobia to paint a true picture of race and crime in America.

The deeper reason is that a true picture would undermine the same politically correct mythology that fuels the push for "hate crime" laws. This mythology also increases the large risk that such laws will be enforced very selectively, with evenhanded justice being eclipsed by politics, fanfare, and interest-group lobbying.

This risk may be the most important reason to oppose the House-passed bill.

The bill might be worthy of support if anyone could point to a single bias-motivated crime that it would have prevented. But nobody has. And such proposals have a lot more to do with political posturing than with ensuring that such crimes are adequately punished.

The Washington Post editorializes that we need this bill because hate crimes "terrorize whole communities." Bosh. It would be one thing if the KKK were on a violent rampage unchecked by local and state authorities. But that is not the case. The reality is that only a minuscule percentage of violent crimes are motivated by the targeted biases. And people murdered over money are just as dead as those murdered out of bias.

Hate crimes legislation is thought policing, nothing more and nothing less.

Hate crimes assumes and presumes a mental attitude about an attacker based upon the identity of the victim. The identity or characteristics of the victim may be unknown to the attackers, but if it comes out later that the attackers were racists, homophobes, or anti-Semitic, then the crime is presumed to be a hate crime, even if the motive was money, revenge or even random rage.