MORE REASONS TO OPPOSE HATE CRIME LAWS
By Harmony Grant
8 May 07
Last
Thanksgiving, a tenured math professor at an Arizona community
college sent out an email that could cost him his job. No, it didn’t
contain the n-word. It didn’t criticize homosexual practices
or point out that Democrats in Congress are trying to turn America
into a police state. It was simply George Washington’s “Thanksgiving
Day Proclamation of 1789,” with a link to its location on Pat
Buchanan’s website, forwarded to fellow teachers in honor of
Thanksgiving. Within weeks, the professor’s free-thinking and
patriotic colleagues complained of harassment.
Come again? The instructors of America’s future leaders can’t
handle the historic words of our greatest founding father or a link
to a public leader’s thoughts on immigration!?
Washington’s “offensive” address describes the “duty
of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to
obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore
His protection and favor.” This political giant prayed publicly “that
we may then unite in most humble offering our prayers and supplications
to the Great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon
our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether
in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative
duties properly and punctually…” and so on, in words
that are no longer allowed at a high school graduation, on a navy
shipdeck or, clearly, between full-grown faculty members at a community
college!
For the crime of emailing Washington’s speech with a link
to Buchanan’s site, Prof. Walter Kehowski was placed on forced
administrative leave March 9; the school chancellor recommends the
governing board fire him. The college accuses Kehowski of violating
their non-discrimination policy which promises “an environment
for each Maricopa job applicant and employee that is free from sexual
harassment, as well as harassment and intimidation on account of
an individual's race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation,
national origin, age, disabled, or veteran status.”
Hey, that sounds a lot like the federal “anti-hate” bill!
As we’ve warned for months, the federal hate crime bill is
another big step toward a nationwide speech ban on “hurtful
words” against protected groups. It’s spearheaded and
supported by the same people who support the speech codes that shackle
free thought at universities across our nation and the workplace
non-discrimination laws that do the same at American jobsites.
The appalling speech
code at Texas A&M, America’s sixth
largest state university, is another example of these manacles on
the mind. A&M “literally prohibits hurting
someone’s
feelings.” It forbids students from violating each other’s
rights to “respect for personal feelings” and “freedom
from indignity of any type.” This vague, broad rule could be
used to punish all kinds of unspecified behaviors including protected
speech.
Criminal law should (and does) outlaw violent actions against the
life and property of others. But nowhere does the Constitution guarantee
unhurt feelings! My feelings are my own problem. Hate crime laws,
however, invade the shadowy private space of feeling, bias, and belief.
In 2004, Pennsylvania’s hate crime statute was used to arrest
and indict 11 Christians for the potentially hurt feelings of homosexuals
at a gay pride parade. The Christians’ only crime was to witness
and sing hymns peacefully. They faced up to 47 years in prison.
These are Bad Laws, Period.
Many Christians and conservatives understand hate laws’ threat
to the First Amendment; we’ve written extensively about this
reality. But there are also non-speech-related reasons to protest
hate crime laws. They are an enormous threat to one of the essential
girders of a free society: clear, coherent and fair criminal law.
Timothy
Lynch of the Cato Institute testified April 17 against
hate crime legislation to the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and
Homeland Security. He argued that not only should the federal hate
law be voted down but that all hate crime legislation should be repealed.
He argued persuasively that a federal hate crime law is unnecessary
for the prosecution of already criminal acts of violence; violates
states’ rights in law enforcement; will not deter real criminals
any more effectively than current laws; relies on vague, over-broad,
and subjective definitions; will heighten rather than reduce intergroup
conflict; and will lead to prosecution of thoughts and beliefs rather
than criminal acts.
Lynch’s well-stated arguments were informed by Hate
Crimes: Criminal Law & Identity Politics, by James Jacobs and Kimberly
Potter. Their academic title conceals a valuable extended argument
against hate crime legislation. Like virtually all academic studies
of these laws, Hate Crimes vastly understates both the creator role
of the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish supremacist groups
and the threat of hate crime legislation to the First Amendment.
But this book valuably examines the way “identity politics” distort
our political landscape and the way hate crime legislation enshrines
the victim game into criminal law.
Earning Big Bucks at the Blame Game
Jacobs and Potter define identity politics as those “whereby
individuals relate to one another as members of competing groups
based upon characteristics like race, gender, religion, and sexual
orientation.” (Hate Crimes, p5) In this political atmosphere,
people get power from being members of victimized groups; they lose
by proclaiming success or accomplishment. You win by whining loudest
and demonizing others most effectively.
Needless to say, this is a really rotten way to generate more just
laws, lower taxes, purer culture or truer leadership. Hate crime
legislation is based on this game, on the identity politics we should
discourage, not enshrine in federal law.
Identity politics do not unite Americans; they fracture us into
ever more polarized groups of blame-throwers. Rather than standing
together as Americans against foreign or domestic threats to our
freedom and culture, we instead disassociate into victimized racial
and religious groups, as women against men, or homosexuals against
straights.
Today, our nation is plagued by pundits and commentators who earn
their keep by being professionally aggrieved. Their fat paychecks
come from promoting and exaggerating the gripes of their victimized
group. The worse that racism or anti-Semitism is claimed to be, the
more money and power they receive. These false leaders benefit from
generalizing from criminals’ mentality to the general population,
saying that because some thugs spray-paint bad words there’s
an epidemic of racism in the general population—or from misrepresenting
politically incorrect but legitimate ideas as racism. Anything goes
so long as it serves to inflate the debt owed by society to the victimized
group.
Hate laws crystallize these social divisions into criminal law,
classifying victims according to their political status. “The
very collection and reporting of hate crime statistics encourages
Americans to think of the crime problem in terms of intergroup conflict.” (p134)
This view turns every high profile case into a political competition
rather than an opportunity for the nation to unite against violent
crime.
We’ll Pick Your Prejudices
Hate crime laws thus do not unite our nation into a less prejudiced
society. Instead, they highlight and exacerbate political and social
divisions. By their very nature, they also enforce specific prejudices.
They proclaim some biases bad and criminal, while others are just
fine. This involves the government in the creation of moral orthodoxy,
deciding which biases to prosecute and which to allow. “Creating
a hate crimes jurisprudence forces us to proclaim which prejudices
are worse than others, itself an exercise in prejudice.” (p21)
The whole idea behind “anti-hate” legislation is that
racial, anti-gay, or other forms of anti-group hatred are the very
worst kind. But that’s not the government’s call. Why
is racial prejudice or “homophobia” worse than other
criminal motivations like greed, power, lust, spite, or pure sadism?
The authors of Hate Crimes raise this question and it’s a great
one. Why should you receive a triple penalty if you bludgeon a woman
instead of a man? Why is it worse to rape a woman because you hate
her skin color than to rape her because you love to hear a human
voice scream in helpless pain?
Progressive leftists constantly accuse the religious right of wanting
to legislate morality. Yet they embrace hate crime laws that do exactly
that—these laws proclaim that certain kinds of criminal motivation
or prejudice are morally worse and more socially destructive than
others and should thus be prosecuted three times more harshly. Who
gives them the right to say that?
Hate crime laws do not (and never could) prosecute all “prejudice” and
all bias. Plenty of prejudices are in fact encouraged in our society
and by big media and advocacy groups. We’re taught it’s
important to be prejudiced against Nazis, for example (and also often
against Christians, especially Catholics). Hate crime laws legislate
that only some prejudices are evil.
But that’s precisely what the government is not allowed to
do. Legislating beliefs violates the Constitution in multiple ways
and lights a fuse of dynamite at the very foundation of our free
society. Hate laws prosecute the beliefs behind crimes and enhance
the penalties for these kinds of bias. This is essentially the same
as punishing the criminal for his beliefs. (148)
The world has seen plenty of political systems that legislate the
beliefs their citizens are permitted. We usually use some pretty
unpleasant adjectives to describe those regimes. “Totalitarian” comes
to mind.
My Stabbing Hurt Worse than Yours because I’m Black
Hate crime laws are really, really dangerous and messy to use because
virtually any victim of a violent crime could arguably be the victim
of some kind of hate or bias. Think about it. Policemen could be
shot because of anti-cop bias. The adolescent thug might have robbed
the Indian’s 7-Eleven because he hates Indians. Some really
out-to-lunch feminists want to say all violence against women everywhere
is a product of misogyny, which would make every man-on-woman crime
a potential hate crime.
See where this leads? Hate crime laws have unlimited potential
to fracture and confuse our justice system. They’re political
tools used to make statements about the value of certain groups and
how much the government dislikes certain beliefs. But political statements
have no place in criminal law, which should remain as clear, coherent,
fair, and coldly emotionless as it can be.
Hate crime laws are neither clear nor fair; they protect certain
groups and classes of victims but not others. When do we stop adding
victim categories? If everyone gets protected, hate crime is an empty
category; it means the same thing as generic crime. But if not all
victims are treated as victims of hate, then why some and not others?
This privileging is wrought with political prejudice.
Hate Crime Laws Aren’t About Crime
When you think of a hate criminal, who comes to mind? Major media
almost invariably shows a white neo-Nazi as the thug who needs hate
laws to stop him from beating up blacks or homosexuals. But the reality
is pretty different. Despite constant propaganda to the contrary, “hate
crimes” are not a nationwide epidemic demanding massive federal
intervention. Eighty percent of violent crimes involve victims and
criminals of the same race. “For the 20 percent of violent
crimes that are interracial, 15 percent involve black offenders and
white victims…” (17) Only two percent are white-on-black.
Mainstream media and organizations like ADL focus searing attention
on “white supremacist” groups who advocate limits on
immigration or glorify western, Anglo-Saxon culture. This is because
Jewish supremacists desire to silence the ideas that come from conservative,
far-right, and Christian thinkers. These ideas subvert the drives
for open immigration, unconditional support of Israel, and sexual
amorality, among other things that are steadily corroding Christian
America. Ultimately, hate crime laws won’t just be used to
lock up skinhead thugs. They were invented by Jewish supremacists
who will use them to prosecute Christian evangelism, opposition to
social liberalism, and criticism of Israel.
Hate crime laws are advocated by politicians who see them as an
easy way to win points with the homosexual and Jewish lobbies. Only
this spring do we see the emergence of a vocal "freedom lobby" composed
largely of concerned conservatives and Christians. It's been difficult
for people to even comprehend the way these laws have already been
used and will be used in the future—to jail innocent nonviolent
citizens for exercising freedom of speech. We are used to the seeming
freedom of American life, to easy traveling and outrageous (seemingly
uncensored) media and basic daily liberty. It’s easy to forget
that the remarkable freedom and prosperity of the American experiment
is an aberration in the history of man. The overwhelming trend has
been toward censorship, oppression, politically imposed famines,
genocide, and lawlessness.
Any Way Back?
Jacobs and Potter suggest that hate crime reporting statutes should
be repealed, and so should hate crime sentence enhancements. Is this
possible? Could this ever happen? Yes and yes. It can happen if enough
Americans are educated about the reality of hate crime laws, and
somebody gives the other side of the argument.
There’s a Jewish lobby, a homosexual lobby, and lobbies on
both sides of the abortion debate. Well, it’s time for our
freedom lobby. It can grow as broad as the beautiful land stretching
from Oregon to Maine. All Americans should rally against identity
politics and the divisive, unfair, anti-freedom orthodoxies of hate
crime legislation.
Let's quit allowing politicians to score easy points with uninformed
members of victim groups, whose leaders harm them by emphasizing
past grievances at the expense of future success. Don’t let
your government legislate your opinions, words and beliefs. Protest
hate crime laws to your Senator today and let President Bush know
he must keep his promise to veto the federal hate bill and also not
sign a compromise bill. Whatever happens to H.R. 1592, we must keep
resisting and educating against hate crime laws. It’s time
to take back America’s criminal law.
Call the White House, and say, "Thank you, Mr. President, for
promising to veto the hate bill. We expect you also to not approve
a modified hate bill."
Protest the Senate hate bill! Call your senator toll-free at 1-877-851-6437
or toll 202-225-3121. Leave this message: "Please don't vote
for hate crimes bill S.1105. Hate laws have taken away free speech
in Canada and much of Europe. If you do vote for the hate bill, I
and my friends will never vote for you again." Send your senator
and his 8-10 influential aides Rev. Ted Pike's powerful flyer "Anti-Hate
Laws Will Make You a Criminal." This flyer and names of aides
are available here.
Come to www.truthtellers.org for the list of the crucial 14 Republicans
who have voted for the hate bill as well as 17 Republicans who are
uncommitted. Call and protest immediately.
Let the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith teach you how they
have saddled 45 states with hate laws capable of persecuting Christians:
http://www.adl.org/99hatecrime/intro.asp.
Learn how ADL took away free speech in Canada and wants to do it
right now in the U.S. Congress. Watch Rev. Ted Pike's Hate
Laws: Making Criminals of Christians at video.google.com. Purchase
this gripping documentary to show at church. Order online at www.truthtellers.org for
$24.90, DVD or VHS, by calling 503-853-3688, or at the address below.
TALK SHOW HOSTS: Interview Harmony Grant on current
threats to our freedom of speech and religion. Call (503) 631-3808.
National Prayer Network, P.O. Box 828, Clackamas,
OR 97015
