Thoughts on Obama's Agenda: Hate Crimes

The Obama White House has posted the president's agenda for America. Some of the president's goals listed on the page are laudable, for example, expanding the use of drug courts for some first-time nonviolent offenders allowing them to avoid prison time, and the imposition of harsh penalties for those practicing voter fraud (I'm curious how vigorously this will be enforced against ACORN). However, many of the listed goals are exemplary of the far-left social agenda that many of us were concerned that Mr. Obama would seek to advance.

Among these is an expansion of hate crimes legislation. As heinous as crimes carried out against people strictly because they are "different" are, laws imposing special punishment on so-called hate crimes are not an acceptable remedy.

Anyone who commits murder or violently assaults another human being is motivated by hate in one form or another; anyone convicted of any such crime should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. However, to pick out certain groups of people in order to impose harsher penalties on those committing the same crimes against them is morally wrong and constitutionally indefensible. It is morally wrong because it singles out certain groups as more highly valued by the government than others: if you murder Person A, you will receive X number of years in prison, but if you murder Person B, you will serve X+n years in prison. This is no less immoral than imposing less of a sentence on someone who murders a homeless person than on someone who murders a wealthy corporate CEO.

It is constitutionally indefensible because it is a violation of Equal Protection under the Law ensconced in the Fourteenth Amendment. It also carries First Amendment implications, insofar as it criminalizes the holding of certain ideals or beliefs. The First Amendment protects our right to hold our opinions and beliefs and to express them; it does not discriminate between those that are true or correct and those that are not. In fact, according to John Stuart Mill it is the interaction between truth and error and the resulting "clearer perception and livelier impression of truth" that freedom of speech was intended to protect. Beliefs are not restricted but practice of those beliefs may be -- but only if that practice in and of itself infringes upon the rights of others or is damaging to public order.

Hate crimes legislation, however, turns this standard on its ear, working backwards to go beyond the practice itself to the held beliefs or the thoughts behind them. Under existing precedent, the belief itself is not criminalized, but only actions that are harmful that happen to spring from that belief -- it is important that those actions would be illegal regardless of the beliefs behind them; the law cannot single out a single set of beliefs (this applies particularly to religious beliefs, but conceptually it extends to other types of beliefs). Under hate crimes laws, it would be the beliefs themselves that are criminalized; actions that are already illegal will be punished more harshly based upon the beliefs from which they sprang. Imagine for instance if polygamy were more harshly punished for Mormons than for anyone else (that polygamy laws did not single out a particular group was an important fact considered by the Court in the Reynolds case in 1879). This would clearly be unconscionable.

While one can hardly find sympathy for anyone who treats those different from him as as less worthy of human dignity, hate crimes laws constitute a very real threat to all of our freedoms. They in essence make the holding of certain opinions -- opinions deemed by the State to be impermissible -- a crime.