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stella41b -> RE: Lesbians Attacked (12/12/2008 2:24:44 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: WryGrin
At the risk of defending someone silly enough to expect a measured reaction from people who identify as "fellow deviants," opposingtwilight isn't saying anything terribly controversial. Academic philosophers and political theorists have been chewing on the hate crime issue for the last three decades and have basically concluded that hate-crime laws may be acceptable for utilitarian reasons, but are unjustifiable philosophically without introducing the undiluted notion of a thoughtcrime. I'd provide links, but everybody knows the Academy is rife with dirty homophobes.
I'm coming back here. Up front I'm not going to qualify myself to you or anyone else, I do actually run an sLGBT focus group in West London supported by the local authority, NHS and other charities and if you or anyone else wish to do so you're quite welcome to check out my credentials. But enough of me for now, let's address the points you raised.
I haven't studied any theory at university, I am not a theorist, and I don't care how many decades academic philoophers and political theorists have been debating such issues in universities, how many papers, seminars and discussions have been held, I'm concerned with how it looks down on the front line, out there in the streets, and the practical aspects of hate crimes.
Hate crime legislation is a by product of a trend known generally as political correctness, or if you prefer thought policing, and which I personally would deem appropriate for what I would classify as the second phase of the civil rights movement.
Most crimes are not committed through reasons of hatred, but through a desire of some sort of personal gain, whether this gain be material or financial, as in theft, robbery, fraud, fare evasion, tax evasion, or to gain some sort of psychological or emotional comfort, a way of saving face, to make a point, such as terrorism, murder, rape, etc with the intention of depriving the victim of something, whether it be health, material possessions, or life. I'm generalizing here and being simplistic, but in many cases the criminal has no emotional relationship with the victim. There are exceptions of course, in murder, rape, child abuse, etc but this emotional relationship between criminal and victim isn't always the case.
However in criminal law reason and motivation for committing a crime is extremely important when it comes to justice, sentencing and crime prevention. Hate crimes differ primarily for the fact that they are motivated and perpetrated simply through hostility, prejudice and hatred felt by the criminal towards the victim. Most hate crimes are unprovoked and are therefore prima facie cases, i.e. there is no defence.
You are right, in that to seek to prosecute someone for a hate crime simply compensates someone for having their basic right of freedom of personal expression inhibited by inhibiting the right of personal freedom of self-expression and it can be seen that hate crime legislation can be seen to be seeking to correct a wrong with another wrong.
quote:
ORIGINAL: WryGrin
For a lighter-weight you might have heard of, gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan has been arguing against hate crime legislation for the last ten years or so. Here's his latest blog entry on the subject. Andrew is also very publicly gay.
I am very publicly a transgendered female and lesbian. I am also critical of hate crime legislation for the above reason and feel that hate crime should be replaced by a much simpler crime against a person law on the basis of prejudice and discrimination expressed towards that person by the attacker. It's not important to label the hatred towards another person which motivates the crime, but simply to recognize it as a motivation or reason behind the offence.
quote:
ORIGINAL: WryGrin
Of course on some level, you knew this already. If you could refute the "all crime is hateful" position, you'd have done so earlier, and then started fielding offers from Ivy League humanities departments and negotiating your high-six-figure salary. Instead, you lamely went ad hominem. But what specific personal attack sprang most readily to mind? Homophobia. Thoughtcrime. Doubleplus ungood.
Now this is where you start jumping to conclusions and missing the point. The OP is about a story of a man who physically attacks two women who are lesbian, and from first sight it would appear to be an attack which is motivated by prejudice, hatred or hostility towards these women because they are lesbians. Your posting concerns the law and legal aspects, so okay, but we mus surely understand that law is based on principles and applications of those principles to specific situations. Elsewhere in this thread I have asserted that in principle there is nothing wrong with homophobia, just as there is nothing wrong with transphobia or even racism which is held as an opinion because we have freedom of speech and freedom of self-expression. Nowhere in any of the statutes or laws can you find any law which states categorically that it is illegal or a crime to hate gays, lesbians, blacks, or any other minority group.
Is opposingtwilight, for example breaking TOS here for posting from a homophobic stance? No she isn't. This is the flaw of political correctness and hate crime principles, in that we are made to feel guilty for having prejudices, when in fact it is perfectly natural for us all to have prejudices. Nor is it wrong when such a prejudice is identified to point it out and call it a prejudice. Is it a thought crime? I'm not calling it one, but you did.
However there is a boundary, and that boundary is going from the general to the specific. Therefore if someone makes a homophobic reference or racist remark towards another CM member it becomes a negative reference towards another member and therefore breaks TOS. This is exactly the self same principle when it comes to hate crimes. I is not the homophobic opinion which is the crime, but the hatred which motivates the speech or the action towards that other person which makes it a crime.
And you really think you need a college or university education to be able to understand that simple principle?
quote:
ORIGINAL: WryGrin.
I dated a lesbian for a few years, and she used to describe this reaction as "blue-collar queers looking for a handout, and rich housewives looking for a grievance." The thinking on this issue may be rather abstruse in top-tier Women's Studies departments, where you can publish papers in peer-reviewed journals about things called 'genderfuck' and 'narratology', but her down-to-earth lesbian moms felt the same way. You may think that your hateful knee-jerk reaction to possible homophobia is somehow enlightened, or at least good for society. I'm here to tell you, it's not enlightened. It's base anti-intellectualism. And while it may turn out that the taboo on seeming prejudiced might some day turn out to have wrought some social good, it could just as well achieve nothing more than buttressing the smug satisfaction of self-appointed defenders of an arbitrary virtue.
Hogwash. Yes, the personal account, long words and pseudo-intellectual claptrap here doesn't wash over the fact that you're not making much of a point here only to accuse someone of a knee-jerk reaction and hatred.
My motivation however for my argument isn't a knee jerk reaction nor is it hatred expressed towards anyone (nice try though) but simply based on my own knowledge of social stigma and the parameters of social stigma set out by Bruce Link and Jo Phelan.
There are three basic types of social stigma we can attach to other people to differentiate them from ourselves:
1. Visible social stigma - people with birthmarks, the disabled, transgendered, obese people, as a few examples.
2. Behavioural social stigma - based on behaviour and how someone lives, homosexuals, gays, the homeless, mentally ill, the transgendered, ex-convicts, people who practise BDSM and the alternative lifestyles, for a few examples.
3. Tribal social stigma - labels attached to a group of people, e.g. blacks, Muslims, Jews, Pakis, people of a specific ethnic or national identity, etc.
Now we come to the Link and Phelan Stigmatization Model.
Social stigma is actually a process which involves the following:
Differentiation and labelling This is identifying which human differences are relevant and worthy of labelling, and this is a social process. The first thing to notice here is the oversimplification which is necessary to create groups - old and young, black and white, straight and gay, etc. Secondly the differences which are judged o be socially relevant differ according to time and place. For example in the 19th century someone with a high forehead was deemed to have criminal tendencies, or in Africa overweight women are seen as sexually attractive to many men whilst in the West this is not necessarily the case.
Linking to stereotypes The second part of this process pertains to the linking to stereotypes. Erving Goffman, a Canadian sociologist published a paper in 1963 which focussed specifically on this part of the process and dealt with stigmatization and which today helps us understand the whole process of stigmatization.
Us and Them - The linking of negative characteristics to the differentiated groups of individuals facilitates a sense of separation between the 'us' and the 'them'. It is this sense that the individuals of the labelled group are fundamentally different which causes stereotyping to take place with little hesitation. It is also this 'us' and 'them' component of the stigmatization process which implies that the labelled group is slightly less human in nature, and taking it to extremes not human at all. It is at this extreme at the most horrific events occurm, for example the Holocaust.
Disadvantage The fourth component of stigmatization in this model includes the 'status loss' and discrimination that is experienced. Many definitions of stigma do not include this aspect, however it is the belief of these authors that this loss occurs inherently as individuals are “labeled, set apart, and linked to undesirable characteristics.” The members of the labeled groups are subsequently disadvantaged in the most common group of life chances, such as income, education, mental-wellbeing, housing status, health and medical treatment. Even though some of the groups are able to escape some of these disadvantages, this principle does stand up when applied across the board.
Necessity of power - Link and Phelan also emphasize the necessity of power (social, economic, and political power) to stigmatize. While the role of power is clear in some situations, in others it can become masked as the power differences are so stark. An extreme example of a situation in which the power role was explicitly clear was the treatment of the Jews under the Nazis. On the other hand, an example of a situation in which individuals of a stigmatized group have “stigma-related processes” occurring would be the inmates of a prison. Now you can also consider what prisoners think about the guards here, but this situation cannot involve true stigmatization according to this model because the prisoners do not have the economic, political, or social power to act on these thoughts with any serious discriminatory consequences.
This is exactly the thought processes of people who seek to perpetrate hate crimes, it lies behind racism, homophobia, transphobia and other prejudices.
But you've got to admit, this kind of blows any accusation of hatred and knee-jerk reaction of mine or anyone similar out of the water.
quote:
ORIGINAL: WryGrin
PS. Don't bother replying to me. Unless you're secretly a famous scholar, you don't have what it takes to challenge my opinion.
I'm not a secretly famous scholar, just an increasingly popular human rights activist known for my work in the LGBT communities in Warsaw and London and also for my work with the homeless.
Your words stand. I've quoted them. Let my words stand the same. Please feel free to quote them should you decide to try and come up with a better argument to continue this discussion.
As for whether I have written enough to show that I have what it takes to challenge your opinion I will make no further comment and let my words in this posting speak for themselves.
ETA Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_stigma
Anyone needing contact details of the centre where I work is welcome to contact me on the other side and I will provide the link to the website.
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