Hate crimes always seemed like a stupid idea to me. If you are a Jew and your family member is murdered, do you really care that the murderer is a Jew hater? It goes the same for Blacks, Gays, or any other group. Personally, I would not care what the murderer’s motivation was; I would want them dead regardless. It is not a stretch to understand that people would use the law to expand the notion of a hate crime. That has once again been proposed making it an even better idea to junk the statute.
Hate crime legislation was first proposed in the 99th Congress which lasted from 1985 through 1986. It finally passed overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives in the 101st Congress in 1989 and then did the same in the U.S. Senate that year. George Bush, the elder, signed it into law that year. Just because it was passed with such large numbers and signed by a Republican president did not make it a smart idea.
It was initially passed to collect and publish data on crimes of race, religion, or ethnicity. In 1997, the categories of sexual orientation, gender or disability were introduced as additional categories. They passed and became law in 2009.
The question of motivation is always open to interpretation. As you may remember, a person went into some facilities that were deemed to have sex workers in them, mostly of Asian heritage. Of course, you must believe all Asians are exactly alike even though they could be in the U.S. from more than a dozen countries. When it became evident that the murderer was more interested in their employment orientation than the native heritage of the people he murdered, the press adjusted their storyline to question whether there was now a new category of hate crimes — against sex workers.
“Hate crime legislation has never been about punishing people for their beliefs or speech. Rather, it is about punishing people for their criminal actions.” That is a quote from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) website. Of course, it is about punishing people for their thoughts or words; otherwise, there would not be enhanced penalties for violent crimes because it is perceived that the person who perpetrated the crime does not like Jews or Blacks or Gays. The hate comes specifically from what they said or what they have been shown to believe. Very few hate crimes have people writing on the chest of the victim that the only good Jew (Black or Gay) is a dead Jew (Black or Gay).
“There is a troubling new expansion of antiscience aggression in the United States. It’s arising from far-right extremism, including some elected members of the US Congress and conservative news outlets that target prominent biological scientists fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.”
That statement by Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, Dean National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University, was made in an article in the Public Library of Science Biology Journal. He calls for hate crime protection for scientists — especially Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Though the article does not cite any physical threats made against various scientists, it does cite where people have questioned their decisions and findings. With the Left, including President Biden, constantly telling us we must listen to the scientists and criticizing anyone who dares to question the advice of the anointed, it does seem it was the logical next step to make it illegal to question “scientific authorities.”
To further justify the rationale of his lofty argument, Professor Hotez compares the people who denounce scientists to you guessed it — Nazis. For good stead he not only names Hitler, but Mussolini, and throws in Marxists to be inclusive. But there is no mention of the erratic and inconsistent advice offered by the scientists for the past two years; just that one is evil for questioning them.
You are saying to yourself that this idea is from one person in one journal. Don’t bet against the proposal moving forward. This is how Critical Race Theory, ballot harvesting, and other harebrained ideas have moved forward into the mainstream and adopted as the gospel by the Left. After all, that is how we got the idea of hate crimes in the first place. On many college campuses today one can be accused of spewing hate speech by skipping over trigger warnings.
Jumping on the hate crime bandwagon is the National School Boards Association. The organization sent a letter to President Biden asking for federalizing enforcement against parents protesting the actions of school boards across the country. That is despite little to no acts of physical violence against school board members and certainly no cases of parents protesting outside of elected school board members’ homes or following them into bathroom stalls. In the letter they stated, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” It had to come, parents protesting policies regarding the education of their children taken by school boards at public schools is now proposed to be a hate crime.
Is it far behind to consider it a hate crime to criticize the President? Unless, of course, the President is a Republican.