We will disagree here.
What you are saying is that if two cars of teenagers go looking for trouble, and each one commits a random drive-by shooting, they should be punished differently if in one car they said "let's off the tenth person we see" and in the other car they say "let's off the tenth honkey we see."
I don't think society is better protected by having differing standards for this.
And the hate crime theory is a dangerous one to try to exploit. If you read the US press, you can't have missed the huge fuss over the "black church burnings" a few years ago. They were almost universally accepted to be connected, to be the work of anti-black groups or individuals, to be classic hate crimes.
The follow-up story was much less widely covered: that after the FBI intensely investigated all these burnings, they didn't find any racial pattern in them; that there was no evidence of any spate of hate crimes, that both black and white churches were burning, that many of the fires turned out to be accidental, a few arson for various non-racial reasons, etc. I don't recall exactly, but I don't think they came up with ANY that were true hate crimes -- that is, black churches being targeted because of the race of the parishioners.
There's no question that hate is a negative influence in a society. But once we start to punish thought, or enhance punishment because of the philosophy of the perpetrator instead of the deed itself, I think we go down a very dangerous road. We're back, IMO, to Bonhoeffer. |
