Hate Crimes and Hypocrisy

On the question of whether hates crimes legislation should be extended to cover gays, Ramesh writes:

[Brad Plumer] seems to think that it would be bigoted for conservatives to accept laws against hate crimes while opposing their extension to cover hate crimes motivated by hostility to gays. I don't see why a conservative who thinks hate-crimes laws are a bad idea generally couldn't conclude that they aren't going to be uprooted from the statute books but shouldn't be expanded in scope, either. Politicians make this sort of judgment all the time.

To which Andrew responds:

If gays were a minor or trivial category in this area, Ponnuru might have a debater's point. But, as a proportion of their population, gays are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S., just behind all those targeted for their various religions (which includes over 90 percent of Americans, as opposed to the 3 percent that gays make up.) Doesn't excluding the most vulnerable group suggest a bizarre set of priorities? Take Ponnuru's and my religion, Catholicism. In 2004, there were 57 hate crime incidents recorded against Catholics. In the same year, there were 1,197 such incidents against gays - and yet Catholics vastly outnumber gays in the general population. What sense does it make to include Catholics (and Zoroastrians and Mormons) in hate crime laws but not gays - who are exponentially more likely to be victims?

But if you oppose hate crimes legislation in principle (as Andrew does, for what I think are very good reasons) but recognize that it's politically unfeasible to roll back the laws we have on the books, the fact that gays "are the largest single group victimized by hate crimes in the U.S." would seem to be an argument against extending hate crime laws to cover them, not an argument in favor of it. Suppose I opposed any ban on abortion, but lived in a country where the practice was illegal in the third trimester, and where public sentiment made rolling back the late-term ban unfeasible. Then suppose a politician proposed extending that ban to cover the first two trimesters. It wouldn't make any sense for my pro-life friends to say, in an effort to persuade me to support the ban's extension: "hey, we already have a ban on abortion, and most abortions take place in the first two trimesters, so if you accept the late-term ban, you should accept the early-term ban as well." If a law's bad, but you can't get rid of it, the last thing you would want to do is expand it dramatically.

I understand where Andrew's coming from in this argument - he's reacting against the double standard of having hate-crime protections for Catholics but not for gays, and he's of course right that the reason that many GOP lawmakers feel comfortable drawing the hate-crimes line where they do is because of the persistence of anti-gay sentiment. His opposition to hate crimes laws, in other words, is taking a back seat to his desire for gay equality; if we're going to have unjust laws, he thinks, they should cover gays as well as blacks and Jews and so forth. But if you believe that prosecuting someone for what's in their heart, as opposed to what they've done, is illiberal and arguably unconstitutional, does it really make sense to dramatically expand such prosecutions just to prove a point of principle? Or put another way, if hate crimes laws are really "a contest of vulnerability in which one group vies with another to establish its particular variety of suffering, a contest that can have no dignified solution," as Andrew once eloquently put it, then why does he want homosexuals to be ushered into the contest? Just because Pat Robertson doesn't want them there?

Comments

"But if you believe that prosecuting someone for what's in their heart, as opposed to what they've done"

Have you ever written anything in response to the argument that we already do that via different degrees of murder and such? I'm just interested in what the counterpoint to that is.

I don't have any burning passion against hate crimes laws, my opposition is lukewarm. The slippery slope argument probably worries me most, but I guess that's not the greatest intellectual reason in the world to argue for or against something.

Posted by Ben | May 8, 2007 5:16 PM

Any type of "hate crime" is fascism, plain and simple. The managerial state but uses these "hate crimes" to liquidate the old ruling elite (white Christian Europeans) in the U.S. and replace them with a new non-Western wordly elite. Plain and simple. Anarcho-tyranny.

Posted by TS Eliot | May 8, 2007 10:04 PM

BTW, Ramesh Ponneru hates the West. He supports the third-world invasion and thus is guilty of treason. Like the Indians in Camp of the Saints, he detests Western Civilization with every breath he takes, which is why he hates real conservatives and wants to wallpaper over real conservatism with Jacobin abstractions.

And Andrew "Bareback" Sullivan just uses "conservatism" as a Trojan horse to promote his gay-activist agenda.

Posted by TS Eliot | May 8, 2007 10:07 PM

Is this really a "dramatic" expansion? What exactly is the argument for seeing it as such? Because, as gays are the biggest victims of hate crimes, there will be substantially more of them brought into the courts...? Is this simply a quantitative concern or is there something else going on here?
As Ben points out, people are prosecuted for what is in their hearts or heads all the time. Why should this be any different?
Arguments like Ross's are, in a strong sense, entirely liberal - they deny that the government should take any stance on morality or have any specific vision of what is good for people.

Posted by berger | May 9, 2007 12:04 AM

I'm a big fan of Sullivan, but I really think he has two ideologies -- one concerning gay rights, and another concerning everything else -- that are often irreconcilable.

Posted by right | May 9, 2007 12:43 AM

I'm a big fan of Sullivan, but I really think he has two ideologies -- one concerning gay rights, and another concerning everything else -- that are often irreconcilable.

In fairness to Andrew, that describes pretty much everyone. Most of us have experienced something on a personal level that leads to an insight that doesn't line up with our larger ideology.

Posted by Ben | May 9, 2007 1:29 AM

Just curious - is there any evidence that these laws either deter attacks, or lead to heavier punishment for them? I could see the point (even if I'd still worry about the slippery slope) if there was evidence that local auths ignored such assaults, as in the pre civil rights era. But I have not seen any proof of this.

Barring that, it's a bad idea 3x over - it's unnecessary, over-federalizes (and adds to an already heavy US Atty work load), and poses the prospect of unequal enforcement and infringement of First Amendment rights.

Posted by chris | May 9, 2007 10:10 AM

Why is it all right to consider certain motives as, say, "aggravating factors" that allow the imposition of the death sentence, but not for hate crimes laws to consider motive?

I have literally never heard any answer to this from a hates crimes opponent, let alone a good one.

Posted by Katherine | May 10, 2007 2:13 AM

"His opposition to hate crimes laws, in other words, is taking a back seat to his desire for gay equality. ..."

To use a favorite phrase of his, you've "nailed" Sullivan and the reason he's lost something in recent years. More explicitly, his willingness to sacrifice a higher value to a lesser one.
His endorsement of John Kerry contains elements of same.

Posted by downeast | May 10, 2007 7:58 AM

Katherine, I'll take a stab at your question.

I think the difference b/w weighing your normal aggravating factor and weighing bias as a motive is two fold.

first, most aggravating factors as I recall are pretty basic fact questions. did he have a gun? was the victim under 18? that sort of thing. they don't require plumbing the depths of the criminal's mind and soul. hate crime laws do.

2nd, you do not have concerns about thought crimes and politically motivated selective prosecution with aggravating factors.

Posted by chris | May 10, 2007 1:12 PM

I think one reason Sullivan is so ticked off about this is because he suspects the National Review crowd is being insincere. In other words, nobody REALLY is thinking, "gosh, I really do think that in a perfect world, gays should have equal protection as Catholics have, but since hate crime laws are such an affront to federalism and First Amendment principles, I can't support their expansion".

Rather, what he suspects-- and I suspect-- is the real thinking is one of two things. Either: (1) "we think homosexuality is a sin, and government should be able to discourage homosexuality, and therefore oppose expanding any anti-discrimination laws to cover gays and lesbians because it would make it more difficult for the government to force people out of homosexual conduct"; or (2) "we don't really have any problem with gays and lesbians, but the success of the conservative movement depends on the votes, donations, and support of homophobes, so we can't afford to support any type of gay rights".

Then, they come up with semi-sophisticated arguments to cover those sentiments. I bet Sullivan would not give National Review nearly as much grief if they just admitted they support discrimination against gays and lesbians. He thinks these arguments are being made in bad faith. I know I do.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 10, 2007 3:36 PM