| Pure Politics |
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| There is a federal hate-crimes law, and a bill before Congress that would extend it beyond race, colour, religion and national origin, to include sex, disability and sexual orientation. |
He was subjected to almost unimaginable pain and terror, apparently because he was gay and ran into two men who were, to put it mildly, uncomfortable with that. Matthew Shepard died in a Wyoming hospital Monday, five days after his comatose body was found dangling from the fence he'd been lashed to. He had been pistol-whipped, tied up and exposed to near-freezing temperatures; the man who found him 18 hours after the assault thought the body was that of a scarecrow. Doctors said his skull had been so crushed that nothing could be done to save him. And now the aftermath of this nightmare. The codicil to virtually every news story about Mr. Shepard's death has been a call for the passage of new hate- crimes legislation. Without ever explaining what exactly that is, we are informed that 40 U.S. states have such laws, 21 of them covering crimes committed because of a person's sexual orientation. There is also a federal hate-crimes law, and a bill before Congress that would extend it beyond the current federally protected categories -- race, colour, religion and national origin -- to include sex, disability and sexual orientation. President Bill Clinton featured prominently on most TV news programs, urging lawmakers to pass the bill. Who could be against legislation making it a crime to beat up a gay person, or a black person or an immigrant? But existing law already does that. The men accused of killing Matthew Shepard, in a state with no hate-crimes law, are charged with first-degree murder. The maximum penalty is death. So what is this legislation the United States desperately needs? For starters, it isn't a restriction on free speech, though civil libertarians sometimes argue it is. But neither federal nor state hate-crimes laws would, for example, stop the Ku Klux Klan from using derogatory words to describe African-Americans. Instead, hate-crimes laws simply increase the penalty for crimes committed with some kind of antigroup motivation.
| Who could be against legislation making it a crime to beat up a gay person, or a black person or an immigrant? But existing law already does that.
That may sound like a reasonable proposition, but let's think it through for a moment. Imagine that someone assaults you and takes your purse. Under U.S. federal sentencing guidelines, this might warrant, say, three years in prison. Now let's say you just happen to be a Jehovah's Witness, assaulted and robbed by a man wearing an "I Hate Jehovah's Witnesses" T-shirt. Under current hate laws, the sentence would be "enhanced" by pushing it three steps up the federal sentencing ladder -- making the prison term a year or two longer.
| What's more, as James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter noted last year in their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics , the people caught by these laws are not whom you might expect. For example, U.S. Department of Justice statistics show that the overwhelming majority of interracial violent crimes in the U.S. involve black assailants and white victims. A law that imposes extra penalties on "bigots" ends up working a lot like the extra-severe U.S. drug laws, sending more young black men to prison for longer terms. But that's not what bothers us most. We're simply not comfortable with the idea that beating up someone because you don't like their religion or race or sexual orientation is "worse" than beating up someone because you don't like them. An assault is an assault and murder is murder. All violent crimes are about hate, and should be punished as such. |
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