Hate Crimes Crap

February 17, 2001

By Douglas B. Wakeman

It seems that the rationale behind hate crime laws is that more people are affected by the crime than is the actual victim, because the perpetrator has advertised that he performed his crime against all members of the group to which the victim belonged. If a crime is worthy of greater punishment because it is directed against a group, rather than an individual, shouldn't a crime that targets an even larger group be even more egregious? If a specific group is not singled out when a horrific crime takes place, then all members of society must be frightened and intimidated, not knowing whether this particular nut would have left them inviolate or not. If this is the case, then, when a killer targets only one small subset of society for his hateful act, then he should receive a lesser punishment. After all, if it is true that all members of a group suffer when a crime is committed against one member of the group, far more people are injured when no single group is specified. If some nut kills a bunch of grasshopper worshippers, it causes the rest of society, (non grasshopper-worshippers), far less distress than if the same nut kills randomly on the street corner of some major metropolis.

Then, there is the law of unintended consequences. Hate crime laws tell all prospective perpetrators of a "hate crime" that when they commit a crime against a member of a group, that they are actually committing the crime against all members of the group. How seductive this must be to your average psychopath. The attitude of society, in implementing hate crime laws, says that all you have to do to exact harm on the entire group that you hate is to cause harm to a randomly selected member of that group. What greater affirmation would the nut need than the rule of the law of the land to assure him that he is actually harming the entire group that he hates? A racist or homophobe or sexist might lash out blindly at the first object of his disease that he sees, but how many reticent followers of his dementia might also join in the fight if they were assured by the law that they could harm the entire movement by hitting a single member?

Anyway, this is all off the point. Any reasonable person knows that the purpose of these types of law is to divide the population up into armed camps of envy, confusion and hatred to facilitate the glorious peoples' revolution in which we all live under the bootheel of a centralized totalitarian state.