Thursday, May 03, 2007

Why Hate Should Not Be a Crime

For those of you interested in where hate crime legislation is heading in this country, here are a few links to check out.

H.R. 1592

USA Today

Stand to Reason

AFD

Christian News wire

GovTrack

World Net Daily

5 comments:

Chance Witherspoon said...

Do you think the real agenda behind this legislation is to ban religious condemnation of homosexuality? I don't really understand how this is beneficial...seems like there might be some other private agenda involved. But then again do people commit hate crimes against the elderly or veterans?

Walk said...

Well the legislation is meant to protect certain groups that have enough political power to gain "preferred minority status". So any group that doesn't have enough political power is not protected. I think most of it is political rather than meant to stop hate. So anybody who commits a crime against a "preferred minority group" must do so out of hate.

I mean a person that kills someone because of their race, religion, sexual preference is already guilty of murder, they would be punished regardless of whether it was a hate crime or not. The difference, as Voddie says, is that with hate crime legislation we are authorized to crawl into the perpetrators mind to determine if they have hate toward a "preferred minority", if so we punish them more. How do you define hate anyway, if a Packers fan beats up a Bears fan because he hats the Bears, is that a hate crime? I mean all violent crime could be considered motivated by hate.

Eventually, comments such as "Jesus is Lord" would be considered hate speech. But the church has been there before.

Vitamin A said...

maybe i'm just too much of a hippie liberal, but i dont see it so much attacking the church, for example, if a catholic in the south got killed by the klan, that would have to be considered a hate crime. I dont think this is targeted against the church, but like i said, i'm a hippie liberal

Anonymous said...

i think the hippie is just taking that stance because he likes to consider himself a liberal hippie and not because that's what he actually believes

Walk said...

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/007/hate-crimes.htm