I'm with you on the I-told-you-so rights. I'm grateful that crimes that might under other circumstances be ignored are getting some attention, but on the other hand it really bothers me that they can legislate whether or not I hate someone.
ANY violent assault is illegal. Once you bring the concept of a thought crime into the equation, I worry about the same over-the-top thing you're talking about. It also bothers me because it is often arbitrarily applied.
I understand that as a society we want a BIGGER punishment for people who do certain things, like the truck-dragging murder in Texas or the Matthew Shepherd case, but the fact remains that no matter whether the perpetrators hated blacks or homosexuals, it is ALREADY illegal to kill people. Those cases involved torture. It doesn't matter WHY they hated them, or even that they did; what matters is that they brutally killed other people.
I just forsee a time when every common brawl becomes a "hate crime."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-05-17 11:24 am (UTC)ANY violent assault is illegal. Once you bring the concept of a thought crime into the equation, I worry about the same over-the-top thing you're talking about. It also bothers me because it is often arbitrarily applied.
I understand that as a society we want a BIGGER punishment for people who do certain things, like the truck-dragging murder in Texas or the Matthew Shepherd case, but the fact remains that no matter whether the perpetrators hated blacks or homosexuals, it is ALREADY illegal to kill people. Those cases involved torture. It doesn't matter WHY they hated them, or even that they did; what matters is that they brutally killed other people.
I just forsee a time when every common brawl becomes a "hate crime."