A number of posts here have mentioned "thought crime" and hate crime legislation as supposed indicators of lack of freedom.
This makes me wonder about what exactly it is that the opponents of hate crimes want to be free to do, were their actions not criminalized?
For many conservative opponents of hate crime legislation, their intent is pretty clear: they want to commit violent acts against gays, blacks, and other minorities with minimal reprecussions. They are afraid of and opposed to a vision of society that respects minorities and other traditionally oppressed groups, and that (and not some purported ideal of "freedom") is the real reason they fight hate crimes legislation.
David Neiwert[1], has made some excellent rebuttals[2][3][4] to the "thought crime" and anti-hate crime legislation arguments, from which I'll quote below. I encourage you to read the posts in full, because they make many other excellent, relevant points from which I'll have to refrain from quoting in the interests of not making this post too long.
Do hate-crimes laws create thought crimes? The issue has certainly
been addressed in the courts, notably in the definitive Supreme Court
case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell:
Mitchell argues [via the First Amendment] that the Wisconsin
penalty-enhancement statute is invalid because it punishes the
defendant's discriminatory motive, or reason, for acting. But motive
plays the same role under the Wisconsin statute as it does under
federal and state antidiscrimination laws, which we have previously
upheld against constitutional challenge. … Title VII, of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, for example, makes it unlawful for an employer
to discriminate against an employee "because of such individual's
race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." … In Hishon, we
rejected the argument that Title VII infringed employers' First
Amendment rights. And more recently, in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505
U.S. at 389-390, we cited Title VII (as well as 18 U.S.C. 242 and 42
U.S.C. 1981 and 1982) as an example of a permissible content-neutral
regulation of conduct.
Nothing in our decision last Term in R.A.V. compels a different
result here. That case involved a First Amendment challenge to a
municipal ordinance prohibiting the use of "`fighting words' that
insult, or provoke violence, `on the basis of race, color, creed,
religion or gender.'" … But whereas the ordinance struck down in
R.A.V. was explicitly directed at expression (i.e., "speech" or
"messages"), … the statute in this case is aimed at conduct
unprotected by the First Amendment.
Moreover, the Wisconsin statute singles out for enhancement
bias-inspired conduct because this conduct is thought [508 U.S.
476, 488] to inflict greater individual and societal harm. For
example, according to the State and its amici, bias-motivated crimes
are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct
emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest. … The
State's desire to redress these perceived harms provides an adequate
explanation for its penalty-enhancement provision over and above
mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs or biases. As Blackstone
said long ago, "it is but reasonable that, among crimes of different
natures, those should be most severely punished which are the most
destructive of the public safety and happiness."
Of course, this is William Rehnquist, but the ruling was unanimous.
Nonetheless, I think Matt Singer puts more or less the same argument
much more elegantly in his first post on the matter:
[T]he real answer is that hate crimes laws don't punish individuals
for their thoughts. They punish individuals for acting on their
thoughts in unacceptable ways, by targeting a community for
violence.
Frankly, I've always found the argument that these laws are "thought
crimes" to be a little creepy, since it is echoed in the claims of the
Christian Right that hate-crimes laws that include sexual orientation
are an attempt to impinge upon their freedom of speech. But gay-bashing
is no more a free-speech right than is lynching or even, say,
assassinating the president. Political thought may motivate all of
them, but that doesn't mean the Constitution protects any of them.
"or many conservative opponents of hate crime legislation, their intent is pretty clear: they want to commit violent acts against gays, blacks, and other minorities with minimal reprecussions."
No, I believe a crime is a crime. I believe in equal rights and clear cut rules. If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense.
What most conservatives are very afraid of is the "code word" mentality that was demonstrated in the 2012 election cycle. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics for some serious horror.
"If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense."
In response, I'll just quote David Neiwert again (for sources, see the links in my previous post above):
Throughout the text, they consistently describe hate crimes laws as
being designed to create special "protected groups," a focus derived
solely from viewing the special-interest advocacy that often spurred
these laws' passage. Moreover, they consistently describe the laws as
protecting only these selected groups and not everyone in society
equally.
This is simply a false characterization of the laws themselves. None
of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims
-- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the
perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a
gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by
someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only
logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in
either case.
Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are
victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand
prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court
case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting
a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI
statistics for yourself.
Hate-crimes laws generally have three chief categories of bias
motivation: racial, ethnic and religious. Some statutes include sexual
orientation, others include gender bias. It's important to keep in
mind that everyone has a race, an ethnicity, a religion (or even lack
thereof). Everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender. This is what
makes the laws generally universal and fully in tune with the
equal-protection clause.
...
These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and
there are two components of it that need addressing. ...
First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes
are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude
unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was
raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching
legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.
Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the
Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws
that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A
clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All
crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in
Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes
of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch.
It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in
nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from
second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference
among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from
the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference
between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.
Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes?
Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.
The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth
of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate
victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the
victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching
era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community.
They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt
Welch puts it in the post that started this debate:
So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate
crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate
victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond.
But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from
their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are
substantial. Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston
University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his
landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law
(1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on
hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my
arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly
through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of
hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in
most respects, indeed in nearly every detail):
Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes.
This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed
with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve
physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in
Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to
the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for
crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes
reported to the police involve assaults. Secondly, bias-motivated
crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious
physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found
that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults
suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults
generally is closer to 30 percent. …
Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on
the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on
the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random
reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public
place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the
victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific,
personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference].
Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk
of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics
that made him a victim.
A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the
very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no
escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not
safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of
one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias
crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime
victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm
associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than
the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias
crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as
depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of
helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. …
… Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community.
Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the
security of its members and their property but also the shared value
of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a
heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound
violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination
principle that have become fundamental not only to the American
legal system but to American culture as well.
Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their
parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially
greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.
So, if I were to believe your quote, a brother or sister who attacks me is more psychology damaging then a random stranger, so they should get a higher penalty. A spouse or parent should really get the extra time. Why aren't those listed?
Nope, actions are what we can measure and put on the wall. Everything else is opinion.
So I suppose you believe that a somone who killed another person unintentionally and by accident should be punished just the same as someone who killed another person deliberately and with a lot of premeditation.
After all, the only thing that differentiates the two cases is the intent of the perpetrator. And we can't measure intent, can we? Or can we?
Intent is part of the law and action of a crime. I specifically added the self-defense part to my first post to illustrate that. Belief of the person is only important as view from the action and circumstances of the crime (eg. did this person knife the person because they were being attacked). It is generically applied to all people regardless of their own attributes (race, creed, etc.). The law is blind and we are all equal. Intent in the commission of a crime is a separate idea and has nothing to do with "hate crimes".
Intent, or (to use the legal term) mens rea, has everything to do with hate crimes.
To quote David Neiwert yet again:
Lawrence points to the distinction between bias crimes and their
underlying parallel crimes, which in effect create two tiers of
evidence for any kind of hate-crime prosecution to succeed. At both
tiers, the criminal's mens rea is an essential component. In the first
tier of a crime -- say, an assault -- the intent to commit the crime
still must be established; at the second tier, both the first-level
intent and the second-tier bias motivation must be proven. For a
bias-crime prosecution to succeed, it must establish both tiers of
mens rea.
Thus someone who merely partakes of hate speech, with no intent to
intimidate, is guiltless of a hate crime, because the first tier of
motivation is absent, and thus no free-speech rights have been
infringed upon. But because menacing and intimidation, all of which in
fact take the form of words alone, are punishable crimes in every
state, anyone using hate speech to terrorize his neighbors has
partaken of a bias crime.
Consider, for instance, the example of cross burning. A white
supremacist who burns a cross at a private rally is undoubtedly
voicing a kind of racial hate, but there has been no attempt to
intimidate or menace anyone, and no crime has been committed.
Likewise, someone who, say, dumped garbage on a black neighbor's lawn
would only be guilty of harassment or intimidation, not a bias crime
(unless, of course, evidence existed he had done so because of the
neighbor's race). But someone who burns a cross on his neighbor's lawn
has clearly committed a hate crime, because he has both the intent to
intimidate and racial bias as his motivation.
In this sense, hate-crime laws avoid running afoul of the First
Amendment in the same fashion as any other of the myriad
sentence-enhancement laws, including anti-terrorism statutes, because
they all reflect the differences in mens rea among acts that are
already established crimes. More to the point, there are limits to
free-speech rights; threats and intimidation are already illegal, as
are incitement to riot, incitement to murder, and other kinds of
speech.
And indeed the Supreme Court recently has moved in this direction in
upholding the constitutionality of hate-crime laws. The recent
cross-burning case, Virginia v. Black, produced a March 2003 ruling
(authored by Sandra Day O'Connor) that followed this logic closely.
The state of Virginia, the Court said, was well within its rights to
outlaw cross-burnings meant to intimidate:
The protections the First Amendment affords speech and expressive
conduct are not absolute. This Court has long recognized that the
government may regulate certain categories of expression consistent
with the Constitution. … For example, the First Amendment permits a
State to ban "true threats," … which encompass those statements
where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an
intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular
individual or group of individuals. … The speaker need not actually
intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true
threats protects individuals from the fear of violence and the
disruption that fear engenders, as well as from the possibility
that the threatened violence will occur. … Intimidation in the
constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true
threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of
persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily
harm or death.
"No, they are guilty of harassment, property damage, and possibly assault depending on the legal definition in the jurisdiction."
Well, according to the hate crime legislation Neiwert is referring to, they are guilty of commiting a hate crime.
Whether they should be guilty of commiting a hate crime (depending on your opinion of the worth of hate crime legislation) or whether that hate crime legislation itself should exist is debatable, and you can argue one way or the other. But it is clear that a violation of the existing hate crime legislation has occurred in the example given by Neiwert above, for the reasons he gives.
As for your implication that the underlying crimes of harrassment, property damager, and assault are enough, I refer you to the second half of an earlier Niewert quote I posted above.[1]
"The last paragraph does not support "hate crimes" legislation, it points out what a threat is."
A threat to whom exactly? To people who single out others based on their race, color, creed, sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin, religion or gender and commit harrassment, property damage, and assault "with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death"?
I sure hope they feel threatened. Because they need to realize that our society will not tolerate these sorts of actions, just as society has less tolerance for deliberate, premeditated killing than it does for unintentional, accidental killing.
Intent does matter, and that's what hate crime legislation is a recognition of.
I believe all "hate crime" legislation is bunk and sets up unfair interpretations of situations. The threat is to a fellow human and it should be punished in the same way no matter the classification of the victim. Equal means equal under the law. Anything else is a political stunt.
"it should be punished in the same way no matter the classification of the victim"
Hate crime legislation does not protect people based on "the classification of the victim". It protects everyone equally.
Maybe you missed it, but David Neiwert pointed this out in one of the quotes I pasted above.[1]
None of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion
of the victims -- rather, they are focused solely on the
motivations of the perpetrator. A person need not be actually
gay to be the victim of a gay-bashing hate crime; he need only
have been perceived as gay by someone who specifically set out
to assault homosexuals. This is only logical, since the
terroristic motivation of the assault is present in either
case.
Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites
are victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over
a thousand prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the
definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved
a black man accused of fomenting a hate crime against a couple
of white teens.) Check the FBI statistics for yourself.
That is bunk, plain and simple. A crime against an accepted classification will get more play than one without. Look at the discussion on college admissions and Asian students to see how unfair this stuff is in real life. Anytime you venture too far into subjective criteria over objective leads to serious trouble.
> they want to commit violent acts against gays, blacks, and other minorities with minimal reprecussions
Actually this is incorrect. The hate speechs laws were recently tested in the Supreme court [1] and they are not simply based on threats of violence in speech against discriminated groups (that is already covered by many federal laws)
The provincial level speech laws are intended to criminalize (via fines) speech containing prejudice in order to promote social equality. For example, the intended objective in Saskatchewan hate speech laws:
> “tackling causes of discriminatory activity to reduce the harmful effects and social costs of discrimination.”
> “appropriately balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings,” wrote Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein for the court.
But what's worse is that they are trialed in special tribunals and the defendants don't have access to the standard legal defence rights.
> Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists stated that Human rights commissions "were never meant to act as language nannies. The current system allows complainants to chill the speech of those they disagree with by entangling targets in a human rights bureaucracy that doesn't have to operate under the same strict rules of defence as a court."
A few years ago, there was a book where the general implication was that Muslims in Europe would gain power/majority just through sheer "out-breeding" of other ethnicities/religious groups. This was deemed to be 'hate speech' because it might incite people to commit hate crimes against Muslims.
Note: I did not read the book, so I don't know how inflammatory it was. Just adding an anecdote.
The book itself was not found to be hate speech. The Canadian Islamic Congress made a human-rights complaint about an excerpt from it, which was published in Macleans, at both the federal and (multiple) provincial levels. They never should've been brought in the first place, but all cases were eventually dismissed.
That's ... odd, or based on outdated statistics per David "Spengler" Goldman, in his writings that include titles like "The Closing of the Muslim Womb" (one of the things freaking out the rulers of Turkey and Iran). About the only place where it might be playing out that way the last time I checked is the U.K.
You left out what I view as the best part about these tribunals, just before your last quote from Wikipedia, a great example of "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely":
"Lemire (with the qualified support of PEN Canada and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, among others) has won the right to cross-examine HRC investigators concerning their conduct during investigations, namely their posting of provocative racist comments on websites. Jonathan Kay, of the National Post, opined that the HRC had "managed a seemingly impossible task: They've found a way to rehabilitate the image of neo-Nazis, transforming them from odious dirtbags into principled free-speech martyrs.""
Nice "business" they've got, plant racist speech at the websites of their enemies and then prosecute them for it (or something close to that, I forget the details now).
This argument, one that is seen quite often, is quite possibly the worst in the subject. Making assumptions and straw man arguments to support your position is not something to build legislation off of. Immediately assuming that someone who is against thought-crime like laws is siding with racist, violent, hate-crime supporting individuals is so absurd that you have to have to preform some serious mental gymnastics or doublethink just to make it seem reasonable.
Arguments like these are very comparable to those who support the erosion of privacy online and at home. They don't want people or the government to snoop around in their data, so that must mean that they're pedos hiding child porn in their hard-drives, right?
This is a prime example of a lack of critical thought.
>This makes me wonder about what exactly it is that the opponents of hate crimes want to be free to do, were their actions not criminalized?
I think that you're confusing the opponents of hate crime laws with the people who commit hate crimes, or else I don't understand who "their" refers to in this sentence. That's a terrifyingly aggressive equivocation when it comes to laws, punishment, and policing.
The defense that hate crime legislation is fine because labor discrimination law is fine is weird. Labor discrimination law is screwed up and unenforceable in the US, because it allows people to be terminated for any reason excepting a few. For example, I can fire you because I don't like your face, but I can't fire you because I don't like your race. IMO it's a way of papering over a complete dysfunction in the balance between the rights of workers and the rights of employers, one that tends not to acknowledge, even theoretically, that workers deserve any rights at all.
This is not an issue with assault or murder. If we have a list of less valid reasons to hurt and kill people than others, we are simultaneously creating a list of more valid reasons to hurt and kill people.
Also, anyone who says that they don't understand how people could criticize hate crime laws as laws criminalizing certain kinds of thoughts, when the only qualifications distinguishing them from other laws are speculations on the mental state of a person committing a different, separately recognized crime, is being disingenuous.
This is a good classic example of the left's defense of thought crime legislation. First start off with the requisite statement that conservatives are racist. Then roll out some convoluted logic that nobody buys on why thought crime legislation is needed.
Leftists (not liberals) just don't have the courage to come out and say that generally leftist ideology doesn't value freedom of speech as much as say libertarians.
This makes me wonder about what exactly it is that the opponents of hate crimes want to be free to do, were their actions not criminalized?
For many conservative opponents of hate crime legislation, their intent is pretty clear: they want to commit violent acts against gays, blacks, and other minorities with minimal reprecussions. They are afraid of and opposed to a vision of society that respects minorities and other traditionally oppressed groups, and that (and not some purported ideal of "freedom") is the real reason they fight hate crimes legislation.
David Neiwert[1], has made some excellent rebuttals[2][3][4] to the "thought crime" and anti-hate crime legislation arguments, from which I'll quote below. I encourage you to read the posts in full, because they make many other excellent, relevant points from which I'll have to refrain from quoting in the interests of not making this post too long.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_neiwert[2] - http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003_06_08_dneiwert_archive.htm...
[3] - http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003/12/thought-crimes-newspeak...
[4] - http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2003/06/hate-crimes-response.ht...