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| Thread: Hate Crimes |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Corribus
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posted May 06, 2009 06:40 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 00:40, 07 May 2009.
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@ Minion
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Should psychological damage be taken into consideration when considering the punishment? To me, it seems natural that it is taken. If you can convince me that it should have no value, go ahead. I do agree that "psychological trauma" is something that is hard to objectively quantify. No denying that.
If you can’t objectively quantify something, how can you objectively quantify the variable that is supposedly based upon it?
Essentially, the claim here is that the punishment of a crime should scale with the degree of psychological trauma experienced by the victim. We can easily put that in mathematical terms. Let’s assume it should be a linear relationship, so you can specify y = a*x, defined that the intercept is 0 for ease of discussion, where y is the punishment of a crime and x is the psychological trauma. So we have that the punishment is some linear function of the psychological trauma - as the trauma goes up, so does the punishment. That’s great in theory. But if you have no capacity to objectively and fairly determine the value of x (the degree of trauma) for a given crime, how can you honestly and fairly evaluate a value of y (the punishment deserved)? (No need to even get into quantified distribution of values and uncertainty, although that would be an equally relevant problem.)
So you see, it’s not a matter of the theory being wrong, it’s a matter of impossibility of application. I don’t need to convince you that the psychological damage has no value, because it’s irrelevant. If the law is to be applied fairly, this model cannot be accepted.
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That brings us to the study made by The National Institute of Mental Health, I have no idea if it is correct or not but if other studies show different I have no problem changing my mind at all.
I don't know of any. I’m not even saying the study is wrong. I’m just wary of “studies”, especially “preliminary” ones. I have found that in most cases the people citing studies have completely misrepresented (or not even read) the actual findings, and even when the citation is honorable, the study was either biased or poorly conducted.
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Here is one study made in Canada Hate-motivated crimes are unique in that they can have effects on the victim beyond those commonly associated with non-hate crimes.
I’ll read it and respond later.
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The car example is simple, if a person destroys my car 10,000 he should pay less than if he destroyed my 50,000 car.
Ok, by “pay” I’m assuming you’re referring to financial restitution. That’s not part of a criminal lawsuit, and I apologize if my analogy was misleading in that regard. Certainly in a civil lawsuit this happens all the time. But we’re talking criminal law here.
If a criminal stole a $50K automobile, do you feel he should get a worse punishment (jail time, say) than if he stole a $10K automobile? Should the actual degree of the felony be different? I hope you don’t feel this way, because the problem with such a system is quite obvious. It means the law favors people of a certain economic status. It is akin to saying that criminals who commit crimes against wealthy people should be punished more severely than criminals who commit crimes against poor people. We had such a system of laws in feudal societies, where it was a much worse crime to kill a nobleman than it was to kill a serf. Not only is this morally wrong and implies that some peoples' lives or property are worth more than others just by virtue of who they are, but it also encourages crimes against poor people (relatively speaking) by discouraging crimes against rich people. (A criminal would be more likely to steel a poor person’s car than a rich person’s car because the penalty for the latter is greater.) In reality, ALL auto thefts should be deterred equally, regardless of how valuable the actual cars are.
Another problem with this hypothetical car law as described above is that it also erroneously assumes that the value of a car is measured only in dollar amounts – for instance, while the Benz may be more valuable dollar-wise than the Ford, in fact the owner of the Benz might have four other card, whereas the owner of the Ford has no other way to get around, etc. Well, I think you get the idea. It's hard to put a "real value" on a physical car; how hard is it to do so on something as nebulous as "psychological trauma".
Anyway, that may all sound irrelevant to you with respect to the problem of punishments for hate crimes, but I think the problems associated with special hate-crime laws are exactly the same as the problems associated with the car crime analogy I presented above. Hate crime laws: (A) treat the victims of such crimes unequally based solely on who they are*; (B) actually foster divisiveness in society by creating an artificial class system; (C) don’t act to discourage ALL crime, only crime against a certain demographic; (D) have no objective way to quantitatively measure the value of the damage done to the victim; (E) trivialize the losses felt by victims of “lesser grade” crimes; and etc.
*Imagine if crimes against homosexuals were punished LESS severely than similar crimes against other people. How would you feel about that? That, of course, would be perceived as unfair by homosexuals, no doubt. So why is it ok for crimes against homosexuals to be punished MORE severely?
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Absolutely not. Only if they encourage OTHER people to commit felonies against homosexuals and they do so, they are to be punished as well.
Ok, yes, I too agree free speech has its limits; sorry, I did not mean to imply that it doesn’t.
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I am not against free speech. Why do I need to fight against some made up accusations about where I stand? Really ruins the debate atmosphere for me. If I were American I bet the next thing would be to question my patriotism. But I take it that you are just exaggerating the examples to keep the discussion going. However, I want the court to notify my objection to the style. j/k
Well, I hope you see that it was a rhetorical question meant to call attention to what is an apparent contradiction in your logic. I am not accusing you of being against free speech. I asked you if you were against free speech because I don’t see how a person can support a person's right to voice an opinion about a certain lifestyle – even if the broadcasting of his opinions can cause “psychological damage” to other people - but at the same time advocate punishing someone extra harshly because of an action that causes the same kind of “psychological damage”. And before you tell me that the type or quantity of “psychological damage” experienced in the two instances is not the same, I have to point out that you’ve already acknowledged above the difficulty in comparing a vague quantity like “psychological damage” in the first place.
In other words, my contention is that if the reason you want to prosecute hate crimes as more serious infractions of the law is because of alleged larger degrees of “psychological damage” that result from such crimes, then it seems only logical that people who cause similar kinds of “psychological damage” merely by speaking their mind should also be prosecuted in some way. Which is, of course, against the principles of free speech. So, somewhere in there is a contradiction or a line to be drawn. In order to have your cake and eat it, too, you need to be able to justify that contradiction.
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The fear of a woman not going out because there is a rapist out there is different, she doesn't feel that it is personal.
I think that’s pretty presumptuous of you to define how a woman feels when she’s raped. Unless you are a woman who has been raped AND have been also the target of a hate crime. Then, MAYBE, you have some authority to make such a comparison. Yet, even then, such a comparison is predicated on the assumption that all “feelings” in this regard are both (A) easily quantified and (B) homogeneous (small distribution about the mean for a large population), which, I think, has been satisfactorily demonstrated above to not be the case. I’d wager if you could find 100 people who had both been raped AND were targets of a hate crime, and asked them to QUANTIFY which was worse, you’d get quite a wide variety of answers (and a whole lot of troubled, confused faces).
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A muslim (that is a minority in some given country) that fears to go out because he knows that his very identity is hated is different. It can cause alienation from the society.
Alienation from society can also result from hate-speech spoken people who speak out that they hate Muslims. Thus, I will repeat my question: should we punish them, too? And, assuming your answer is no (because you support free speech), how do you logically justify the contradiction?
I will help you out with the following table. Consider 3 actions.
Do you see the contradiction here? If you consider only the first two rows, it is clear that the increase in punishment from action 1 to action 2 is due to the large increase in harmful psychological effect, because the physical effects are identical. Seems logical. But this would imply that anything that has the same type of harmful psychological effect should have at least some sort of punishment, if the mere presence of a harmful psychological effect is justification to add extra punishment in the case of action 2 compared to that of action 1. Yet, action 3, which has a bad psych effect, has no punishment at all. Something doesn’t add up.
The only real conclusion I can come up with from the table is that the proposed system is wrong. Note that the table would be perfectly logical if “harshest” (conveniently highlighted in yellow) was changed to “harsh”. So we are left with the question: why create a table that doesn’t make any sense? The only answer I can see is that this proposal is not about logical laws; rather this is really just about either emotion and/or politics. History has shown that laws based on emotions or politics are usually unfair and/or hard to enforce, so in either case, this really has no place in our legal code.
* For sake of argument, I’ll also give you that the psych effect of a hate crime is worse than just plain hate speech, and much worse than an “ordinary” beating. However, I maintain that, being qualitative terms open to a lot of interpretation, these values are vague at best and meaningless at worst.
EDIT: Some grammatical fixes.
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TheDeath
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posted May 06, 2009 09:57 PM |
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Should psychological damage be taken into consideration when considering the punishment? To me, it seems natural that it is taken. If you can convince me that it should have no value, go ahead. I do agree that "psychological trauma" is something that is hard to objectively quantify. No denying that.
Then it has no place in law.
By that logic, when someone robs me, I could pretend that I'm very psychologically damaged for extra punishment, if I may so desire?
How do you know how damaging psychological robbing me is? What if I get more damage from it than another dude? Should the aggressor be punished harsher simply because I can't cope with it? (in this example)
If not, who decides how severe it is for me?
The simplest and least flawed here is, of course, to not decide that in the first place. Or rather, not take it in account.
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TheDeath
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posted May 07, 2009 12:54 AM |
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People need to be punished more severely for Hate Crimes because they are often times premeditated and always very directed at not only an individual but an entire social class.
You know, we got that. We got what you were saying. But seriously do you even at least understand the full points we (the anti-"hate"-crime legislation dudes) make? We've already addressed this 3 or 4 times already, but never received a reply.
The obvious problem is that it is completely impractical and arbitrary. You absolutely cannot have that in law. What does "Social class" mean? Is an assassination against some rival considered that way? Let's say that the 'rival' is a corporation, so it's not an 'individual'. Does that count as hate crime too? Further imagine a death, not of an ordinary citizen, but of someone who results in MASSIVE loss of profits. Should we punish more severly as well? After all, the boss will lose a lot of money (this means, "higher damage") if one of his key employees dies or is assassinated. Doesn't that give the employee an extra special right under the law? I mean, it's like "that man is more important, if you kill him, you'll end up severly more punished than killing a random citizen."
Can you guys (you and Minion) at least once show us CONCRETE, non-emotional, HOW-IT-WORKS method? It's also nice to say "Let's save everyone" but if you can only save half with available time or resources, it just isn't practical, you HAVE to be concrete. We heard your story, but we need solid implementations, which are completely arbitrary, flawed, and may I say, very easily abused.
And what mvass means by 'special rights' is thus: gay people receive special rights because hate crimes only apply to straights who are aggressive towards gays. A gay has more freedom in beating a gay than a straight, assuming same punishment is output. This can happen the other way though it is rare.
By the way, "black" people have equal rights for a long time.
Didn't stop their 'passion' of being 'proud to be black' though 
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mvassilev
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posted May 07, 2009 12:55 AM |
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Father, you constantly ignore my key point: there is no such thing as an assault against a race, class, sex, or group. There are only assaults against individuals. If I kill a black guy, I kill a guy who happens to be black - I have not made an assault on the "African-American community" regardless of the reasons for my murder; I have only made an assault on one individual.
As I have stated previously, this whole idea of "community" is what is at the root of the problem.
And the idea of "group rights", IMO, is completely wrong.
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Corribus
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posted May 07, 2009 01:02 AM |
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Edited by Corribus at 01:05, 07 May 2009.
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@Father
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OMG, ok this will officially be my last post in this thread.
So you keep saying. 
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I'm sick of that term. Not a single person within the Human Rights Campain is searching for Special rights, nor will you find any bill that uses this wording.
No, of course you won’t find it on a bill, be politicians are too smart/crafty for that.
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People keep on saing that by seeking these rights (which you continually and falsely refer to as "special" rights) that we are actually moving out of the realm of "being equals". Here, you are all seriously mistaken. Why do I say this? Corribus, Mvass, and whomever else.. You guys are trying to look too deeply into an issue that is best served up on the surface. You use long words, phrases, and for the love of god you now even have tables and graphs or whatever... --rolls eyes-- People need to be punished more severely for Hate Crimes because they are often times premeditated and always very directed at not only an individual but an entire social class.
Father, would you kindly explain to me how a law that only protects a small portion of the population has anything to do with equality?
Let me be more specific – if a person is punished extra severely for committing a crime specifically against a homosexual, how does that make homosexuals (as a group) more like everybody else?
That’s a very specific question, mind you, and it should have a very direct answer. I hear a lot of stuff about emotional trauma, psychological damage, and so forth, and even if I grant you all of that, I still fail to understand how punishing a criminal leads to equal rights… or has anything to do with civil liberties at all.
To me, it’s sort of like saying, “I wore a baseball cap today so that I could watch a donkey eat a carrot.” Sure, it’s a grammatically correct sentence, but what does the heck does the first half of it have to do with the second half? Maybe there’s a proper context that would give the sentence meaning, but as it stands, it’s just gibberish.
To me, your argument is the same thing. Yeah, I understand the two halves of what you’re saying, but the verb doesn’t connect them into a logical chain of thoughts. Maybe I’m missing some vital contextual detail that will help me, which I’m hoping you’ll now provide…
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The rape issue? You completely missed the point and I'm floored that someone like you would miss it. Rape is already treated, dare I say it? "Special". It has its own name, classifications and punishments...they are all RAPE. Really, how you could even ask those questions without realizing that? lol --shakes head—
Right, because rape is a class of crime. But we don’t treat rape against a rich woman differently than rape against a poor woman, or rape against a red-haired woman differently than rape against a black-haired woman. They are all rape! What YOU are advocating is that we treat rape against a lesbian because she is a lesbian as different than rape against a heterosexual.
Moreover, that’s not even why I brought rape up, which any careful reading of what I wrote would reveal. This is strange considering not one page ago you spoke at length about how carefully you read each post.
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Sorry, rather than reading through posts that take me 30 minutes to read I could be doing something else a bit more active and result achieving...like pulling weeds.
Nobody is forcing you to be here.
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You guys poke and prod because you love to argue and talk and debate on these forums.
Actually, I resent the implication that this is just a game to me. The abuses of government is something I take very seriously. But thanks all the same for trivializing my interest in the matter and assuming that only a homosexual has a real reason to care about the issue. I also resent the implication that, as a heterosexual, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on the matter. I find all of that quite disrespectful. 
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Aculias
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posted May 07, 2009 01:25 AM |
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Corribus.
I think you read too many books & less real facts about real life.
That is why there is book smart & street smart.
I am not saying anything else
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Corribus
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posted May 07, 2009 01:45 AM |
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I see, so you'd rather base all of our laws on emotional knee jerk reactions and prejudices rather than sound logic and equal rights? 
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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Aculias
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posted May 07, 2009 02:37 AM |
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I see, so you'd rather base all of our laws on emotional knee jerk reactions and prejudices rather than sound logic and equal rights?
You dont understand, there is so little that can be done.
I am not speaking in logicical book terms like these guys.
I am speaking for reals on this issue.
Everyone of us has some kind of hate.
Some take it too far.
Our leaders are also haters & Bush was a big example.
That is why there will always be wars.
The hate crime is usually gang related or people who simply have a problem with something.
Rape is hard to prove being rich or poor.
Even though the rich have a better chance of proving it since they have that SO CALLED class.
I just dont think there can be anything that can be done.
Unless we bomb a whole city like Oakland & start over.
You cant just be book logical Corribus.
You have to really look into why people hate so much.
Why they commit crimes.
There are so many crimes that you would have to wipe out the human race.
There is only so much that can be done.
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TheDeath
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posted May 07, 2009 02:52 AM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 02:53, 07 May 2009.
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Aculias why do I get the impression that you're on a totally different wavelength of thought?
This isn't about whether hate exists or not, as I'm sure no one would doubt that. It's what to do ABOUT someone committing a crime by hate, or by something else.
If this were a topic discussing the punishment for criminals, it's like you came and posted about "criminals will always be there". Yeah thanks for the tip but we were discussing what to do ABOUT them.
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Mytical
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posted May 07, 2009 05:10 AM |
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Father, please think of this from the otherside. For a moment, lets say that the people of the world had been largely homosexual (lets not get into population discussions and the like though) for as long as written history. Now, this law comes to be for heterosexuals. For whatever reason you and a heterosexual get into a fight and for whatever reason you are being charged with assult. He claims it is because he is Heterosexual, and since it was only the two of you at the time it is your word against his. You can not prove it wasn't except your word..both of you as trustworthy as the other..guess what..his version would most likely be the one taken. Would you want to go to prison for an extended period JUST because of the law?
Whenever a select group benefits from something that the rest of society does not, that is a special privilage. How would you feel if a law came out "Wealth hate crime" if you attacks somebody wealthy(lets say billionairs) it is a hate crime and you will be prosecuted more harsly. Hey billionaires are a minority, but that wouldn't make it right.
Father, I am on yourside with getting equal rights and would lay down my life if need be to make it happen. Seriously, thought. What would you think if a hate crime bill came out where if a LGBorT committed a crime against a heterosexual it was considered a hate crime?
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Corribus
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posted May 07, 2009 05:27 AM |
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Edited by Corribus at 05:28, 07 May 2009.
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The planets must be aligned or something because Mytical actually agrees with me.
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JollyJoker
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posted May 07, 2009 07:25 AM |
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And not only Mytical.
It's actually rather nice not having to post anything because something else did it so that there seems not even something to add.
Except - well, Corribus, this may not mean much, but since I have been rather critical concerning your attitude a week or so ago (and been so for some weeks before that), rather openly, let me admit now, as openly, that I really, really like your "adjusted" attitude and posting style here.
I suspect that this is to be something of a "giving a good example to change things for the better" kind of thing.
As I said, it doesn't mean much, since who am I, but, heck, for me Corribus is back to form and that can only be good for this board.
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Aculias
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posted May 07, 2009 07:45 AM |
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Edited by Aculias at 07:46, 07 May 2009.
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What to do about them is tricky though.
There is a big population of haters out there.
History shows that even some of our leaders have the same hatred.
It's too late for criminals who kill because people are different.
Since it is too late for them to change. I say they deserve the same fate that their victims felt.
I know what yall are saying.
That is why I mentioned that it is hard to clean up hate crimes.
It's everywhere & we cant conquer so much hatred in this world.
We can do what we can.Usually it's too late.
A murder has already happened & then that person gets arrested.
It's hard.
It's like trying to wipe out a whole civilization.
There is just so much you can do.
Unless we have a world wide protest.
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Elodin
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posted May 07, 2009 08:36 AM |
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Edited by Elodin at 09:12, 07 May 2009.
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From my observations hate crime laws are written in order to try to force a politically correct way of thinking on people and to punish those who do not think like the state says they should.
I recall in California and Michigan several churches were attacked by gay rights activits. Yet those gay right activists were not prosecuted for hate crime although the attacks were clearly becaus of the reilgious beliefs of the churches.
There was also incident of an old woamn carrying a cross being shoved around by gay rights activists yet no hate crime prosecution.
Am I trying to say gay rights activists are all violent? No, I am trying to show that hate crime concepts are not and will not be enforced equally.
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Doomforge
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posted May 07, 2009 09:20 AM |
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I agree with Corribus and JJ.. Sorry Father! 
My two cents: hate is not a crime. While hate is not a healthy feeling, we do hate lots of things in our life. It's a, well, basic feeling, something being the core of our nature: being able to love, hate, like and so on. Can you ban hate? Can you make it a crime?
.. well, can you do that with love, envy, lust or any other feeling?
NO. You can't. Those feelings aren't 100% under our control, I mean, we feel envy, but we don't want to, it just happens, feelings come from nowhere sometimes. While it obviously doesn't justify crimes, of course, it's imho enough not to make hate a CRIME.
Murder and such - THOSE are crimes.
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Aculias
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posted May 07, 2009 09:47 AM |
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No crap sherlock.
That is the point we all have been making.
It's good to see people spending a whole time explaining how a feeling is not a crime but murders are.
Yes there will never be equal punishments because of the rights.
People fought for their freedom & their own rights for years.
Therefore there will never be an equal law.
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Doomforge
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posted May 07, 2009 09:51 AM |
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Like YOU wouldn't state the obvious in every possible thread, Acu 
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Aculias
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posted May 07, 2009 11:50 AM |
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Well you know, what can I say?
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Minion
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posted May 07, 2009 02:08 PM |
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Edited by Minion at 18:40, 07 May 2009.
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If you can’t objectively quantify something, how can you objectively quantify the variable that is supposedly based upon it?
I am not qualified to answer this question. All I know is that they seem to inflict more damage by the studies, which can at least be measured somehow.
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So you see, it’s not a matter of the theory being wrong, it’s a matter of impossibility of application. I don’t need to convince you that the psychological damage has no value, because it’s irrelevant. If the law is to be applied fairly, this model cannot be accepted.
If the psychological damage is irrelevant then I would agree with you. But I don't consider it to be irrelevant. I consider it to be hard to define, but not impossible, like you do. But the studies are rather unimportant from your point of view, so I guess it is needless to ask your comment on them. Let's see if there is something else we can discuss.
Stealing a car should be treated the same, like you said, regardless of the value of the car. I think you are trying to make a parallel that some minority group is seen more valuable than the rest of the people by this law. The same was with the nobleman example. And I assure you that by no means is that my intent and I hope it is not anyone's intent favoring this law. Sometimes when there is a problem in society the law needs to adjust to it to tackle the problem.
I agree that offending someone is not a crime. But lets say that someone tortures a family, who happen to be black, and set huge crosses on fire among them. There I think it makes the crime more severe, as it is obviously felt by the entire black community. It tears the very fabric of free society. That is simply not to be tolerated - an it is not my emotions speaking here. That is how I also rationale it  I was a little disappointed at listening to the democrats speeches in favor of the bill, as they very only emotional.
So how hard should the punishment be, or how much harder. I must say that I am not qualified to answer that at all. My reasoning just tells me that it should be somewhat harder. I apologize for not being able to dwell in this any deeper, as you seem to be a law expert and probably very curious especially about this aspect.
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Hate crime laws: (A) treat the victims of such crimes unequally based solely on who they are*; (B) actually foster divisiveness in society by creating an artificial class system; (C) don’t act to discourage ALL crime, only crime against a certain demographic; (D) have no objective way to quantitatively measure the value of the damage done to the victim; (E) trivialize the losses felt by victims of “lesser grade” crimes; and etc.
A) It is not the law that is causing inequality but the crime. When people choose to commit crimes based SOLELY on some attribute of a person.
B) It is violent, bias motivated crimes that divide us and devalue certain people’s lives, not the laws that address the problem.
C) Is that even a criteria? I read this as you want to keep the law as simple as possible. As I can't wrap my head around as to why some section of a law can't be specific.
D) This is where the studies get involved. I have only seen those that state that the psychological trauma is greater, and I doubt you can change my opinion on that without studies showing the opposite. But your point is about what kind of extra punishment is just, and as I said already, I am not qualified to determine that.
E) A random act of violence resulting in injury or even death is a tragic event that devastates the lives of the victim and his or her family, but the intentional selection and beating or murder of an individual because of who they are terrorizes an entire community and sometimes the nation.
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*Imagine if crimes against homosexuals were punished LESS severely than similar crimes against other people. How would you feel about that? That, of course, would be perceived as unfair by homosexuals, no doubt. So why is it ok for crimes against homosexuals to be punished MORE severely?
Because it is more damaging to the individual and society? I know your point is that the rest of the people would feel they are less worthy. I find it hard to believe, that people would really find that a big issue. I really think most people don't care.
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In other words, my contention is that if the reason you want to prosecute hate crimes as more serious infractions of the law is because of alleged larger degrees of “psychological damage” that result from such crimes, then it seems only logical that people who cause similar kinds of “psychological damage” merely by speaking their mind should also be prosecuted in some way. Which is, of course, against the principles of free speech. So, somewhere in there is a contradiction or a line to be drawn. In order to have your cake and eat it, too, you need to be able to justify that contradiction.
The Act does not punish thought or speech or criticism of another person. The Act punishes only violent actions – not thoughts or beliefs -- based on prejudice. Doubts about the constitutionality of bias motivated crime laws were squarely addressed by the Supreme Court in the early 1990’s in two cases, R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul and Wisconsin v. Mitchell. These cases clearly demonstrate that a criminal statute may consider bias motivation when that motivation is directly connected to a defendant’s criminal conduct. By requiring this connection to criminal activity, these statutes do not chill protected speech and do not violate the First Amendment.
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I think that’s pretty presumptuous of you to define how a woman feels when she’s raped.
You misunderstood me completely, I was speaking of the fear of other woman feel after someone is raped. Yes they feel fear, but it is not personal. I was not addressing the raped woman in no way!
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Alienation from society can also result from hate-speech spoken people who speak out that they hate Muslims. Thus, I will repeat my question: should we punish them, too? And, assuming your answer is no (because you support free speech), how do you logically justify the contradiction?
Because they are distinct. The law does not infringe with free speech nor should it. It targets prejudice based crimes. Sorry if this wasn't a profound answer, I need to hurry to school and I want to post this before it gets lost.
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"These friends probably started using condoms after having produced the most optimum amount of offsprings. Kudos to them for showing at least some restraint" - Tsar-ivor
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted May 07, 2009 07:25 PM |
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Edited by Corribus at 23:01, 07 May 2009.
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@Minion
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But the studies are rather unimportant from your point of view, so I guess it is needless to ask your comment on them. Let's see if there is something else we can discuss.
Not unimportant - ambiguous. By the way, I looked at the link you provided earlier, and it's not a link to a study. It's a link to some summary of several studies, but the page doesn't provide any proper bibliographic information (that I could find) for the studies it summarizes. So how is a person supposed to evaluate its claims? It's typical of a people making a website with an agenda - they tell you what a bunch of studies find, which of course supports their point of view perfectly, but they don't give you the opportunity to look at the source material yourself. It's likely because they've cherry picked the studies' conclusions.
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I think you are trying to make a parallel that some minority group is seen more valuable than the rest of the people by this law. The same was with the nobleman example. And I assure you that by no means is that my intent and I hope it is not anyone's intent favoring this law. Sometimes when there is a problem in society the law needs to adjust to it to tackle the problem.
That's precisely the parallel I'm making. And whether that's the intent of the people lobbying for the law is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that that will be the outcome, intended or not. I don't think the people who desire this law to be passed are bad people; but they're only looking out for their own interests. It is clear that Father and other people like him (and you, perhaps) seem to think this law will somehow advance the gay rights movement, that it will somehow make you all more "equal". Well, as I said in my earlier post to him, I don't see how the two ideas are connected at all. In fact it actually creates division by setting up an artificial class system, by treating crimes against some people as worse than the exact same crime against other people. In effect, to me it¡¦s no different than punishing someone who murders a social elite much more harshly than someone who murders a social nobody - which is the same sort of laws we had over 800 years ago. It's not an analogy; it's the exact same thing. And it's not a progressive law at all - it's regressive. We might as well reinstitute fiefdoms while we're at it.
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But lets say that someone tortures a family, who happen to be black, and set huge crosses on fire among them. There I think it makes the crime more severe, as it is obviously felt by the entire black community. It tears the very fabric of free society. That is simply not to be tolerated - an it is not my emotions speaking here. That is how I also rationale it I was a little disappointed at listening to the democrats speeches in favor of the bill, as they very only emotional.
That's the problem. There's no logic behind this proposed law - only emotion. Yes, that's a horrible crime. Yes it's traumatic to the whole community. I'm not disagreeing with that.
If you can prove (I don't like that word as a general rule but there it is anyway) that your scenario would be any more "traumatic" (vague) to the surrounding community (vague again) than if some random guy invades some random family's home and tortures them in the same way, then I'll start listening to the proposal for a hate crime law. But I wager that all you'll be able to do is throw around nebulous terms like "fear" and "free society" and "equal rights" and whatnot, terms which sound great on paper but really are impossible to quantify and have little actual concrete meaning. When ANY horrible crime happens, it terrorizes the surrounding community. You see it all the time on the news. So what gives you (by which I don't mean you, personally, necessarily) the right to determine that one person's suffering is worse than another? Suffering is a very personal thing - how can an outsider unilaterally determine that one group of people suffer more as a result of a crime than another?
I am, by the way, no law expert. But I don't think you have to be an expert in the law to believe that laws should at least make sense and be fair to everybody. And I just feel that a careful analysis of this law reveals that it only applies to a certain group of people and is based on the premise that some people allegedly suffer from a given crime more than others.
Individual replies to the "lettered bullets":
(A) I don't see how hate crimes cause inequality. Nobody has explained this to me. Hate crimes wouldn't happen if all people were perceived to be equal. The reason people commit hate crimes is because they have a fundamental dislike of a certain group of people (either their religion, skin color, orientation, whatever). The inequality exists prior to the hate crime being committed. The crime does create divisiveness in society, but divisiveness is not the same thing as inequality; and creation of divisiveness can't be the minimum criterion here for the enhanced punishments of hate crimes because lots of crimes create divisiveness - perhaps not along racial or ethnic boundaries but nevertheless they do disrupt society. And in any case, even if you make all people legally equal, you're still going to have hate crimes because there are always going to be bigots.
(B) I see that we sort of have a chicken and the egg problem here. Well, perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I do agree that "bias-motivated" crimes divide us and devalue certain peoples' lives. However, I do not believe that applying "bias-motivated" punishments is the way to solve the problem. It's like saying that two wrongs make a right. Your contention is that hate crimes make the victims feel like second-class citizens. Ok, I might agree. My contention is that punishing hate crimes more severely makes victims of similar but non-hate crimes feel like second-class citizens. I do hope that, even if we can't come to an agreement on the proper solution, we can at least come to an understanding of each other's reasoning.
(C) It is most certainly a criterion. You don't think that a basic property of any fair law is that it applies equally to everyone? We used to have lots of laws that only applied to certain groups of people (blacks, women, etc.). In fact, I think homosexuals are even now trying to get many of them abolished (marriage laws). These laws are unfair and violate the constitution. Why then would a law that only protects certain people be fair?
(D) I'm not qualified to determine what kind of extra punishment is just, either. I'm not convinced anybody is, and I don't see the justification to base a law off such uncertainty.
(E) The alleged damage to a community is again a hard thing to quantify, and in any case, I can't think of a single crime that punishes a person for a crime against a group of people. I think mvass stated somewhere that crimes are tried against individuals, not against communities. This is true. You will notice that when a person bombs a building, he is not tried of a crime of "mass murder" or something like that. He's tried for the X number of individual counts of murder, and the punishment is multiplicative (I believe).
Let me try a different angle on this one. Suppose John kills Jack, an unmarried man, aged 30. Now suppose Peter kills Paul, in exactly the same manner, but this time Paul is married and has four children. Clearly the murder of Paul is going to cause psychological trauma to a much larger group of people than Jack¡¦s murder. Paul has a family. Jack doesn't. Conclusion: Peter should be punished more severely because his victim has a family and John's family didn't. Fair? Be careful though - the implication here is that if you're going to murder, it's better to kill a single person than a married one. Ergo, a married person's life has more value than a single person's life.
Thank you for the Supreme Court cases. I'll try to find the judges' arguments for each one and read them. I'll be interested to see what they have to say on the issue. I hope you'll understand if I don't comment prior to reading them, though.
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You misunderstood me completely, I was speaking of the fear of other woman feel after someone is raped. Yes they feel fear, but it is not personal. I was not addressing the raped woman in no way!
Ok, good. I'm glad that was just a misunderstanding. You'd be surprised, though how many people presume to judge how other people feel about something.
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Because they are distinct. The law does not infringe with free speech nor should it. It targets prejudice based crimes. Sorry if this wasn't a profound answer, I need to hurry to school and I want to post this before it gets lost.
Hmm, ok I think we're having a disconnect here, as my point isn't getting across. The first assumption of the point I was trying to make is that the difference between hate crime and normal crime (according to you) is only in the psychological trauma cased to the community. This alone justifies the harsher punishment. (If this isn't correct, please correct me.)
My second assumption is that hateful speech causes psychological trauma to a community. (Again, if this isn't correct, please correct me.)
Therefore (conclusion), hateful speech should be a punishable crime. If causing psychological trauma to a community is enough to warrant extra punishment for a crime, then causing any psychological trauma at all should be a punishable offense, shouldn't it?
By the way, Minion, I do appreciate you discussing this in a level headed fashion with me. I understand we disagree on the matter in a fundamental way, but nevertheless I feel I understand your position better. What some certain people don't seem to understand is that only through open, civil discussion will equality and harmony ultimately result. Sitting and talking rationally about problems to find the more acceptable solution for everyone will do far more to heal the wounds of bigotry than any hate crime laws ever will; certainly yelling and screaming at people who don't agree that your solution is the only one is unproductive at best and at worst will potentially turn away many of your allies in your struggle. A fight is much harder to win alone. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that your willingness to engage in the discussion like a civilized adult hasn't gone unnoticed by me. Definitely contributes to the feel-good atmosphere we've had here (for the most part) the last few days. 
@JJ
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And not only Mytical.
Damn, the whole universe must be aligned then. Actually JJ we have agreed on things in the past - just nothing to do with economics.
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Except - well, Corribus, this may not mean much, but since I have been rather critical concerning your attitude a week or so ago (and been so for some weeks before that), rather openly, let me admit now, as openly, that I really, really like your "adjusted" attitude and posting style here.
Well I guess everyone goes through a slump now and then. Even Tiger Woods has a poor round of golf once in a while I suppose.
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I suspect that this is to be something of a "giving a good example to change things for the better" kind of thing.
Well, yes. This place needed some help. I'm glad I'm not the only one trying to make it more congenial. There have been a lot of interesting new topics in the last week by numerous members. Let's hope it keeps going in that direction.
EDIT: Fixed cut and paste errors.
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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