Important Crimes, Important Victims

We’ve got to do something about these people that are afraid that federal hate crime legislation will somehow curb everyone’s rights.

One of the biggest proponents of this idea is syndicated columnist Charley Reese, a Pat Buchanan cheerleader who writes a weekly column for King Features Syndicate. Reese has done a pretty good job of encapsulating all of the arguments I’ve heard on the topic, so I’ll bounce my ideas off his.

Let’s define our terms first. Read a copy of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999, proposed in the Senate, then come back.

Reese claims that hate crime legislation dictates that “if someone hits you on the head because of your religion or sexual orientation, then you are a more important victim than your neighbor who gets whacked on the head just so somebody can steal his wallet.”

He’s wrong. If someone attacks you because of your religion or sexual orientation, you are not a more important victim than someone who has been mugged, and there is no legislation – proposed or otherwise – that ranks crime victims in order of importance.

But while a hate crime victim may not be a more important victim, he is the victim of a more important crime. A mugging is more or less random. Sure, you’re more likely to get knocked over if you’re wearing Donna Karan than those Regis Philbin “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” tone-on-tone clothes, but whether you’re gay or Christian or whatever doesn’t generally figure into a mugger’s decision.

Hate crimes, however, are extremely important crimes because they serve as a message to a group of people: Watch it, this might happen to you. I’m certainly not about to tell a mother whose son was killed by a drunk driver that his death was any less important than, say, Matthew Shepherd’s, but the circumstances behind Shepherd’s death represent a problem at least as great as driving under the influence. If we can prosecute a person with more aplomb because they did what they did while intoxicated, we can certainly go after someone with equal aplomb who committed a similar (yet probably more intentional) crime while fully sober.

But, say Reese and his ilk, what’s wrong with sending a message? Isn’t that protected by the First Amendment? Reese claims that hate crime legislation is the first step toward hate speech legislation, and that supporters of hate crime legislation are simply bleeding-heart liberals who want cops to push their politically correct agendas onto the populace.

Really. I’m not exaggerating, except for use of the term “bleeding-heart liberals.” And the notion that prosecuting someone slightly more vigorously for committing a crime based on racism or homophobia will somehow circumvent the first amendment is absurd. If you want to exercise your freedom of speech, put the damn tire iron down and write a letter to the editor like everyone else.

Hate crime legislation seeks to prosecute a wrong, not perpetuate it. That’s precisely why much of it is worded broadly – to include crimes committed against anyone, even white Christian men.

In Pennsylvania, we have something called the “ethnic intimidation” law. Basically, it addresses crimes aimed at someone because of their race or religion (sexual orientation has yet to be included on the list). It raises the degree of a crime by one – second degree murder, under the ethnic intimidation statute, becomes murder one. Other felonies and misdemeanors follow suit. It’s basically a sentencing guideline.

These guidelines have come into play in the sentencing of 39-year-old Ronald Taylor, a black man who marched through a Pittsburgh suburb last March, shooting white people and raving about white-on-black racism. The whole thing terrified all of western Pennsylvania, especially Pittsburgh, where even the local morning deejays were trying to figure out how this sort of thing is still happening.

“I’m not going to hurt any black people,” Taylor allegedly said to a neighbor.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported this in Intelligence Report, its quarterly magazine. Generally, the SPLC reports hate crimes across the country as news briefs, choosing to centerpiece less regional phenomena. The lead in the SPLC brief was “This time, the gunman was black,” which admittedly displays the situation as an unusual one.

That’s because it is, at least according to the FBI’s most recent statistics. Of 9,235 hate crimes committed in 1998, just over 4,000 were committed by whites – more than the number of offenses where the perpetrator’s race was unknown. Blacks came in second, committing 958 such crimes in 1998.

The majority of victims of hate crimes in ’98 were black, totaling 3,663. Jews were second, with 1,235 victims. Coming in third were gay men, at 1,005. Whites fell just under that, accounting for 1,003 victims in 1998.

Those who would seek to deny a federal hate crimes law seem to think such a law would be used to victimize white Christian men, and that a crime against a white man will be judged by lesser standards than a crime against a black man. For now, we won’t point out the death row statistics recently compiled by the Justice Department, pointing to the fact that minorities might not get as fair a shake as us white folks. For now, let’s address that idea for what it is: Just Plain Silly.

First off, not every crime involving differently pigmented attackers and victims is necessarily a hate crime. If a gay Latino beats up a Promise Keeper, he may be the perpetrator of a hate crime – and then again, he may not. Just as if that same Promise Keeper beat up that same gay Latino, it might or might not be a hate crime. It all depends on what the investigators of the crime determine to be the reason behind it.

Again: Every crime is not a hate crime, and only a percentage of crimes – probably a small one – has even the potential to be a hate crime. Knocking someone over the head because you want his wallet is quite different from knocking him over the head because he’s different from you.

Inevitably, this will screw up, as every policy is wont to do on a long enough timeline. Inevitably, someone will be charged with a hate crime even if it wasn’t, or vice versa. Nobody said the justice system is perfect, least of all Janet Reno.

And if any of us white men are scared that the wheels of justice will start rolling over our shoes, just look at the facts. Like Reno’s report said, you won’t find many of us on death row. We’re generally not the ones screwed over by poorly picked juries and lackluster defense attorneys and poverty and public sentiment. Believe me, gentlemen. We have nothing to worry about.

And what if that were true? What if, somehow, the paradigm shifted, and federal hate crime laws were aimed unfairly at heterosexual white men? What if we woke up one day and the courts were controlled by bleeding-heart liberals who excoriated whites and lionized blacks?

Maybe getting a taste of our own medicine wouldn’t be such a bad idea.