Hate Crimes - Why Does the Issue Divide Us?

Yesterday in California a special state legislative committee met to hear testimony on a number of alleged 'hate crimes', and concurrently, in Washington, D.C. a huge march was held to draw attention to 'hate crimes'.

From a prosecutorial perspective, the idea of sentence enhancements makes this issue very delicate, but from a broad social and public policy perspective the idea of anyone standing up for the right to incite hate or excuse hate-motivated violence seems, well, intolerable in a civil society. Our Republic form of Democracy affords us many freedoms, included among these are the essentials, 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. Yes, we also have freedom of speech, but if that speech interferes with or denies these other rights to an individual or a community, then the scales must be re-measured to determine if the good of the many is harmed by specific exercise of the freedom of one or of the few.

For example, many days while driving home from work I end up stopped at an intersection where a group of evangelicals holds signs reading "God hates F**s".
Every time I see those signs, which I do try to avoid looking at, I feel like I have been slapped in the face. I know that if the sign holders were instead holding signs exercising their free speech to say "God Hates Blacks" (or worse, using a perjorative description as in the anti-gay sign); "God Hates Women"; or "God is Hate, thank Goodness He Isn't Real" - I can't even begin to imagine the furor. If such were the case we'd find Pat Robertson, Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred all on the same stage decrying such heinous ignominy. When you are the one hated, or when you put yourself in the place of the one hated, you feel the full force of hate. You can justify feelings all you want and you can certainly accept differing points of view, but public displays of hatred toward human beings are unacceptable constitutionally even as they are morally abhorrent.

Worse, is when de-sensitization to the repugnant nature of such intolerance and hate leads to violence. One of the cases discussed in the California hearings yesterday involved the death of a young Fijian-American man at Lake Natoma,a swimming and boating spot walking distance from my own home. A group of Asian Indian and Fijian Americans were gathered for a picnic a few months back, and a group of Slavic Americans had gathered nearby. Some of the men iin the former group may have appeared to be a bit effeminate. That's a subjective designation to begin with, and it is also of no consequence when taking the measure of another human being's worthiness to enjoy life and breathe the air in public. But, some in the second group were vocally disapproving of the people in the first group. Other people were using the park at this time, including my family. The general perception if you passed through this area was the second group felt the first group needed to go home with their despicable selves. Yes, that was the impression. The situation simmered for quite some time and ended in the tragic death of a young man of 25 years. He was hit for being who he was or who he appeared to be (his family and friends have said he is not gay, but that he was perceived as such by his tormenters _{(Sacramento Bee, November 15, 2007}) .

It doesn't matter what the item of apparent offense was, this situation typifies public hate speech and ended in an alleged hate crime. Throughout the day people on state park land felt they could impose their beliefs and their hatred on other human beings. I imagined my own extended family enjoying a picnic at the lake, my nephew or my sister inciting someone's hatred and violence just by breathing the same air as them. Or maybe the object of hate wasn't sexual orientiation, maybe it was race. Well then, it would be my children, their father and probably myself as well deemed unsuitable to be alive, happy in a public place. Maybe my older sister and her husband decided to wear George W. Bush tee shirts to the family picnic that day. Maybe it would be lefties deciding they did not have to be subjected to sharing public space with obvious right wingers. Or it could have been my other nephew, in his Special Forces uniform home on leave in between combat tours. And, any time my extended family gathers there are Born Again Evangelical Christians, Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Atheists (my brother in law and his father), Muslims (my former husband) and Jews (half of my father's family and another brother in law), There are white people, Hispanics, Asians, Africans, African-Americans and a bunch of Mediterraneans who are always mistaken for Arabs.

I this country that I love and in which I live, there should not be a place my family and I cannot go to just breathe freely. Our constitution entitles us to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the same constitution that entitled those Fijian and Asian Indian families to those rights. And it entitled the other family at that picnic to feel the way they felt, but to stop short of imposing hate into the public domain, and certainly it prohibited them from moving forward with violent crime motivated by their disdain for people they perceived to be gay.

I think signs that say "God Hates" anything should not be displayed in public. First of all, what the sign holder really means is "I Hate". Have a little courage and say this is something you hold in your own heart. If you believe it comes from God, fine, but it is endowed within you, within your heart and your free will. Of course, if you just say YOU hate something, that's hate speech. But if you say God hates it that somehow endows it with mystical American-Religious foundational sanctity. 'I am only doing as my God leads me to do. And I think that's okay. That's not hateful. If you'd just change who you are and get in line with how I believe my God wants you to be, you can live here and breathe here too.' Where did I hear that before? Oh yes, it was whispered by Sayyid Qutb in quietly during his education in America in the 1930s and then in his native Egypt as he built his underground movement that eventually led (after his death) to the assassination of Anwar Sadat and later to the birth of Al Qaeda. Many still echo Qutb's imposition of personal will and personal beliefs that depart from Islam, through force, and some of those many are believed to still be hiding in the border areas of Aghanistan and Pakistan.

In America we have the rule of law. It is civil law. It means civility is required within society. Hate is anathema to civility, to civil society and to the constitution of the United States. So we can complain all we want about how hate crimes and hate speech are drawn out of proportion or are skewed to protect some and not others, but the reality is, if we adhere to the principles of civility and to the precepts of our constition, then all are protected, even the hateful. No society can prevent any of its members from holding hate in their hearts, but our society should and must prevent hate from being sanctioned in any form. In America, where one's personal belief system collides with the constitutional protections of all and of any in this Republic, the personal belief system must remain personal - not imposed upon society or others throgh force of will. You can assemble, you can worship, you can not worship and assemble, but you cannot publicly incite to hate. You can offend, and in this country in this day and age, most likely anything that comes out of anyone's mouth is likely to offend someone, but you cannot publicly incite to hate, or incite to violence based upon that hate. When whittled down to that essential I have difficulty finding any rational, let alone constitutional argument in support of public hate speech or hate crimes. We must remember we are blessed with the freedom to feel as we do, believe as we do, but it comes with the requirement that we also respect feelings and beliefs of others in the public domain and in our civil society.