A Note on Hate Crimes
I don’t talk politics here very often. I tend to focus on programming and related things. But the name of the blog is “While Coding” for a reason: I blog almost exclusively about things that pop into my head when I’m trying to get some code written. Blogging frees my brain cells so I can work. Lately I’ve been able to let off a lot of that steam through Twitter (much to the chagrin of those who follow me), but every now and then there is a topic that demands more than 140 characters of discussion.
At the library yesterday I ran into a petitioner. “Got a moment for gay rights?”, she asked. That isn’t one of my pet topics but certainly rights – gay or otherwise – are pretty important. I stopped to find out what she wanted. It turned out that she wanted support for a bill adding gays and lesbians to existing hate crimes legislation. I knew right then I wasn’t going to sign anything.
This had nothing to do with gay rights in my mind. From her point of view it was unfair that gays weren’t a part of the existing legislation. I agree, that’s not fair. Unfortunately, hate crimes legislation is a really bad idea to begin with. Adding more classes of people on to bad legislation only makes a bad law worse.
There are two fundamental problems with the idea of hate crimes: For starters, hate crimes really boil down to thought-crime. How do you get inside someone’s head and prove what they were thinking? I asked the petitioner about this. This was a question that she had a stock answer for, and she said that you train law enforcement to be able to recognize hate crimes. You might imagine that her argument didn’t win me over.
The greater problem with hate crimes legislation is that it takes away equal protection under the law. Hate crimes laws may start off protecting one or two classes of people, but over time more and more classes of people will be added. You start with an ethnic or religious protection, then it’s nationality, sexuality, age, gender identity, or just gender. Pretty soon the people not protected by the legislation are in the minority. Once that happens you have created a default class of people who are easier to abuse.
This is similar to why criminal organizations have juveniles commit crimes for them. The punishment is often less for a teenager to commit a crime than for an adult. The same will eventually happen here. It will become no big deal to commit a crime against a certain segment of the population because the punishment will be far less than for crimes against the protected classes.
You don’t solve bias and discrimination with more bias and discrimination.
I should mention as an aside that I really admire people who get out and do the footwork for the things they believe in. This young lady at the library was obviously doing something she really believed in and was trying to make a difference. I wish there were more people out there like that. I also wish that I had stayed more politically active beyond my youth.