Say Anything Blog

The liberals will defend this bill as something that protects minorities and women and homosexuals from crimes motivated by bigotry.  The reality is that this bill is the first step toward criminalizing certain types of opinions that aren’t approved of by the government and an expansion of federal control over local law enforcement to boot.

Lawmakers voted 249 to 175 in favor of the legislation, which was authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Democrat.

President Barack Obama strongly supported the measure, which he dubbed an “important civil rights issue” in a statement late Tuesday urging Congress to approve the bill.

Current law gives national law-enforcement authorities jurisdiction over hate crimes only when directed at individuals on the basis of race, religion, color or national origin, and only when the victim is targeted because he or she is engaged in a federally protected activity, such as voting.

The new measure would expand protections to include gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim, and would expand help from Washington to local authorities to punish hate crimes.

My problem with hate crimes is that it actually creates inequality within the law.  For instance, why should a crime by a white man against a black man that is motivated by racial hatred be more serious than a crime by a black man against a white man that’s also motivated by racial hatred?  If the crime in question is murder, are the crimes not equal?  Or is one life worth more than the other?

Further, why should a murder or assault motivated by racial hatred be any more serious than an assault or murder motivated by the desire for the $20 the person might have in his/her wallet?  Or an assault/murder that is motivated by mere whimsy or insanity?

What’s more, making a crime motivated by an unpopular opinion more serious than a crime motivated by economics or insanity sets a dangerous precedent whereby said unpopular opinion becomes a crime in and of itself.  Which is wrong.  I’ve no love for ignorant bigots, but freedom means freedom and that means being free to be an ignorant bigot.  Now if said ignorant bigot kills someone, then the bigot is a criminal.  But there’s little need to make that crime more serious simply because the bigot was a bigot.

This is a needless complication of our laws.  It is already illegal to assault people or murder them or steal from them, so why not just leave the law as is?  And let the states handle it instead of adding even more federal bureaucracy to the already bloated burden we taxpayers have to carry?

This is rank pandering to people who don’t want equality but rather special treatment.  Not to mention a federal power grab.