Contributors

Friday, June 19, 2015

The Whole Hate Crime Bugaboo

People (and by people, I largely mean conservatives) seem to get so irate about the category of crimes known as hate crimes. Why? I think a big part of it is they can't accept the negative aspects of their own personal ideology (racism, prejudice, bigotry) so they blame the victim. More importantly, they have a profound lack of understanding of how the law works.

There are a variety of categories of what constitutes murder. This is also true of stealing. Yet they don't seem to have a problem with any of these. Each of these laws illustrate how complicated the law can be as it responds to the uniqueness of various criminal acts. Hate crimes is merely another category that offers a more muscular prosecutorial punch. If someone breaks into an NAACP chapter, for example, and writes "Niggers, we will kill you" all over the walls, without hate crime laws, they would be charged with a couple of petty crimes and maybe terroristic threats. With them in place, the punishment is far worse and it should be because we have zero tolerance for this sort of behavior in our culture today.

So, as we learn more of the Charleston shooting and hear more about hate crimes, we are likely to hear adolescent assholes foam at the mouth about hate crimes and how they are all gay and shit. Ask them if they have the same feelings about the hundreds of laws regarding theft:)

2 comments:

Nikto said...

Calling this a hate crime is whitewashing an outright act of terrorism. It's the assassination of a black state senator and pastor. The timing and the location indicate a much greater agenda than just killing a few African American old ladies at a bible study. Roof is trying to incite a race war.

It seems that he found the African American man from South Carolina most like Martin Luther King and then killed him. He is aiming much higher than a simple hate crime, or even a school shooting.

Is Roof a narcissist, a psychopath, a dope addict or mentally ill? Conservatives never care about such niceties when Muslims commit terrorist acts: they condemn all Muslims for the acts of a crazy few. Conservatives don't lose any sleep when cops shoot mentally ill African Americans who are acting out -- in the conservative mind they got what they deserved.

I'm tired of the media making excuses for white men with gun fetishes, trying to find excuses for why they're filled with so much evil and hatred and have so little respect for life. They never try to figure out why some Muslims hate the United States (though after our invasion of Iraq it's pretty obvious).

Why should we waste our time trying to understand the frustrations of angry crackers with an inferiority complex who just can't get over the fact that Barack Obama was elected by a majority of Americans. Twice.

Mark Ward said...

Imagine being a black person in the south and having to drive around and see the names of all the Confederate generals on the streets. Or a confederate flag hanging up in your town.

Constant reminders and heroification of people who fought to keep black people in chains.