Hate Crime

While doing my morning reading, I came across what I feel is an important article. If you have followed any of my writing (either here or at GotDesign) you will know that I try to be fair in everything I do and I also work to point out hypocrisy wherever I find it. And believe me, you don't have to be even as smart as celery to pick this one out.

A young couple in Knoxville was carjacked, kidnapped, raped and murdered. While this is indeed a heinous crime, what is even worse is that prosecutors think it was racially motivated. But the snag is this -- the victims were white and the accused are black.

As the article points out, had this ethnicities been reversed, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and the like would have been descending on Knoxville like vultures to be sure that the world knew of this racially-motivated crime. Since the victims were white, no one wants to give the case any attention. Whites killing black -- a horrendous crime. Blacks killing whites -- not so much.

I have never been in favor of having special "hate crime" legislation on the books. I think it opens the doors to defining crime based on ideology. We are already seeing cases in Europe where Christians are being persecuted for standing up for the Biblical definition of homosexuality as being a sin. And the Europeans are doing this because it has been declared a hate crime to speak ill of homosexuals or homosexuality. Recently proposed legislation (H.R. 1592 -- the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007), which passed through the House of Representatives in May, "[d]efines 'hate crime' as a violent act causing death or bodily injury because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability of the victim." I could make all kinds of arguments about the "slippery slope" this legislation presents, but more basically it create a federal class of crimes that is already available in all of the states. All states have assault statutes that would cover exactly what is proposed here, but H.R. 1592 provides an arbitrary, special class of victims based on ideological guidelines. What I particularly disturbed about with this Knoxville case is the obvious double standard and the special class of victims that such a double standard creates.

What do you think? Chime in and let me know.