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zerosignal -> RE: HATE CRIMES = thought policing? (7/4/2007 7:43:38 PM)
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Since you are an attorney...Is this the argument that you would make in a courtroom defending a white person accused of a hate crime?...That the only reason we could possibly be here is because of "white guilt" and "sheltered white liberals.?"
To quote Belushi "Seven years of college down the drain!"...Are you saying that there are never any crimes that are based sole on race and sexual preference or so few that only white liberals could dare notice? Maybe you should google the numbers, Mr attorney, or have one of your clerks do it for you.
One of the aspects of America is that we are supposed to be tolerant...you know huddled masses and all...So when a crime is committed that is based solely on race...sexual preference..etc....it becomes all the more heinous...And should be dealt with accordingly.
A hate crime is a hate crime...blacks have been charged with hate crimes against whites....the difference is that you will never hear about it in the media because it doesn't wag the dog.
When a crime is committed for no apparent motive other than race...We live in a country that simply will not tolerate such actions and we make it clear by installing the language of hate crimes.
Nothing is perfect....I'm sure there are cases where a person was tried for a hate crime that "hate" was not a motivation for the incident.
Out of curiosity, my uber conservative attorney friend, what exactly are the more "complex realities" of a hate crime.
You can bill me by the hour.
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ORIGINAL: domiguy
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ORIGINAL: zerosignal
In my view, the central cause of racial double-standards enshrined in the law is, ironically, the misguided benevolence of sheltered white liberals. Having lived and worked in some fairly "diverse" environments in my day, my experience has been that most minorities disapprove of the legal double-standards designed to benefit them such as "hate crime" laws or affirmative action. The biggest proponents of both of those policies are privileged white liberals who have never had a meaningful interaction with a member of a minority social group in their lives.
I'm going to take a small bit of rhetorical license at this point and make some generalized assumptions of my own with respect to these white liberals. From my experiences with them, they seem plagued with "white guilt" over their social station and economic advantages, and commit themselves to crusading for equality to assauge those feelings. But, like many members of every social group, these white liberals put unwavering faith in simple concepts to avoid having to struggle with more complex realities. To wit, problems of socioeconomic disparity and historical (not present) institutionalized racism become a nebulous, indistinct conspiracy that lurks around every corner and must be stamped out at all costs.
Confirmation bias leads these white liberals to latch onto the small scraps of evidence in support of their worldview whenever they can find some, such as violent crimes against minority groups. To liberals struggling with white guilt, these crimes stop being isolated incidents of violence or disorder, and become the very symbol of inequality in this country. Naturally, such travesties need to be stamped out right away and thus we are left with laws that treat a crime of assault very differently, depending on what social groups the perpetrator and the victim belong to.
Of course, this fits perfectly with the worldview of liberals grappling with white guilt; they are already predisposed to seeing minorities as victims and whites as oppressors. Such a simplification of social problems leads to the easy solution of giving the "victim" social group extra protections under the law. And so, to at least answer the question posed in the title, I see hate crimes not as thought policing, but as institutionalizing a distorted view of society.
Since you are an attorney...Is this the argument that you would make in a courtroom defending a white person accused of a hate crime?...That the only reason we could possibly be here is because of "white guilt" and "sheltered white liberals.?"
To quote Belushi "Seven years of college down the drain!"...Are you saying that there are never any crimes that are based sole on race and sexual preference or so few that only white liberals could dare notice? Maybe you should google the numbers, Mr attorney, or have one of your clerks do it for you.
One of the aspects of America is that we are supposed to be tolerant...you know huddled masses and all...So when a crime is committed that is based solely on race...sexual preference..etc....it becomes all the more heinous...And should be dealt with accordingly.
A hate crime is a hate crime...blacks have been charged with hate crimes against whites....the difference is that you will never hear about it in the media because it doesn't wag the dog.
When a crime is committed for no apparent motive other than race...We live in a country that simply will not tolerate such actions and we make it clear by installing the language of hate crimes.
Nothing is perfect....I'm sure there are cases where a person was tried for a hate crime that "hate" was not a motivation for the incident.
Out of curiosity, my uber conservative attorney friend, what exactly are the more "complex realities" of a hate crime.
You can bill me by the hour.
Swing and a miss, my friend. First of all, you humorously equivocate on the forum we're in right now. No, this is not a courtroom. No, these would not be the arguments I would make in that setting. Were I making a purely legal argument against "hate crime" legislation, I would reference the long-established Equal Protection Jurisprudence in American law which unequivocally states, "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal." That's Bakke v. Regents of the Univ. of California, by the way. I'd then follow up with a reference to City of Richmond v. J.A. Construction Co., which identified racial discrimination designed to benefit minorities as a suspect classification subject to strict scrutiny. Since you insinuate that you're in the know, I guess I don't have to define strict scrutiny for you; I'm sure you can devise some clever red herring response, anyway. After that, I'd cite Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Ed. which required a particularized evidentiary showing to justify any racial differentials in affirmative action, and link it to "hate crimes" legislation by analogy, and then distinguish Grutter v. Bollinger by referencing the government's burden to justify racial differentials in each individual case and not pursuant to any blanket policy. And once I was done with that, I'd quote C.J. Roberts' recent opinion at the end of the most recent SCOTUS term, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." I dare say that would probably be a bit more persuasive than some Belushi quote used in a sad attempt to come off as clever.
However, since we aren't in a courtroom, I was offering my personal experiences with the proponents of hate crimes legislation. You seem to demand more than that to meet your expectations of intellectual rigor, and I don't have a pop culture quote to respond to yours with, so let me try the following instead.
You say that America is supposed to be tolerant; you provide rock solid support for this proposition by vaguely referencing a poem by Emma Lazarus. The problem with that premise, and what follows it, is that there is a hierarchy of principles in American culture, and the Constitution sits at the very top of it (that's why they call it the Supreme Law of the Land; I know Article VI, Clause 2 is no Emma Lazarus poem, but let's at least compromise and call them roughly equally controlling doctrines of legal policy). Equality before the law is enshrined in the Constitution. An ideal regarding private human behavior, no matter how noble, desirable, or intuitive, is not. When a private individual selects a victim for a crime on the basis of race, that is immoral. When a governmental body institutionalizes special protections in the law for one social group versus another, that is unconstitutional. The latter outcome is worse than the former.
Put another way, a series of individual discrete wrongs is not as bad as an official system of wrongs bearing the imprimatur of the state. If an attack on a black person by a white person, or an asian person by a black person, or a Jewish person by a Native American is truly so repellent, increase the penalties for one person attacking another person. Provide protection from violence to everyone, regardless of social group membership. To approach the problem any other way carries with it the undeniable implication that some social groups are "special" and deserve extra privileges. The American Constitution was written to avoid those things.
And that lesson, genius, is free of charge.
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