by Scott Darnell
Daily Lobo Columnist
Last week, I had the privilege of interning for Rep. Tom Taylor at the Capitol in Santa Fe.
The experience was wonderful and while there were many bright spots, the most riveting policy debate took place in the N.M. Senate over increasing criminal penalties for perpetrators of hate crimes, or in other words, for those who carry out malicious criminal acts against a person or group based on their contempt for the person's or group's race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The legislation eventually passed, despite Senate Republicans forcing debate on the issue for many hours.
The entire concept of a hate crime is quite interesting and poses a great number of contradictions and flaws. First, it's quite amazing that hate-crime legislation is advocated and inserted into our political system by those with a leftist ideology. These same people say that the death penalty isn't a deterrent, that elevating criminal punishments don't deter crime.
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Well, what have they proposed with respect to hate crimes? They want to elevate the criminal penalties given to those who kill minorities and other protected social groups and they fervently feel this will deter further aggression or opposition to these groups. There is a distinct flaw in the logic of hate crime legislation when it's said that elevating criminal penalties is a deterrent in crimes against certain protected people, but not against the populace in general.
Secondly, we're extending the privileges of this legislation to the traditional groups protected under other laws advocating the preferential treatment of minority groups, and sadly adding homosexuals/bisexuals -- those with no outward characteristics or traits by which they can be discriminated against -- to the list as well.
Unfortunately, if these groups dictate a criteria for selecting protected individuals, we are forgetting many other groups of people who have historically been targeted for a certain reason, action, or trait, and maliciously killed or injured because of the hate that stems from that discrimination.
For example, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were killed for their political affiliation and it's safe to say that hatred motivated Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth, respectively, to carry out their assassinations. So let's protect crimes based on political affiliation as hate crimes.
How about Martin Luther King, Jr.? Was he killed because he was black? Not necessarily. He was killed because the thoughts he advocated during the Civil Rights Movement empowered a group of Americans to take a stand against the unjust racial inequality of the time -- and those who didn't care for his ideas hated him. So let's protect crimes based on thoughts, ideas and intellectual, political, or social movements as hate crimes.
Let's protect doctors who perform abortions, workers in abortion clinics and patients who have received an abortion in the hate-crime legislation as well. Because of the actions that take place at abortion clinics, some pro-life activists exercise their hate for the aforementioned groups by participating in crimes against them.
And, to take it farther, let's protect the convicted child rapist under our hate-crime legislation from the intense hatred and ensuing criminal acts of the parents of one of his/her victims.
Hate-crime legislation has the good intention of helping certain individuals that are, at times, singled out in society; we must remember, however, that all victims of crime are singled out and hurt for a particular reason, and thus we can't limit protection to certain special interest groups.
When we place certain groups on a pedestal and give them greater protection, wealth, or rights than we do others, we send a message to our growing generations that the world is not equal, and that there are some groups of people who deserve more than what everyone else does. Is that not the exact sentiment we tried to do away with during the civil rights movement?
If we have to have hate crime legislation, let's protect all those groups or individuals who are injured or killed due to some sort of hatred and once we see that this distinction covers most everyone, let's do away with inclusive legislation and preferential treatment for groups that continue to moan to a government that they know is afraid of them, and let's achieve, once and for all, a true racial equality that will make the generations that follow us indubitably proud.
