From: Chip Berlet
>Libertarians oppose all hate crimes laws, and this particular statistical
>mind game is played to convince White liberals that hate crimes legislation
>is bad because it hurts Black people more than it hurts White people. It
>doesn't, of course, since the goal of hate crimes legislation is to reduce
>all hate crimes in the society, which benefits everyone.
Really? Isn't punishment for one's motivation a further step down the road to criminalising what people think? Traditionally legal systems have punished people not for what they think but the acts that they intentionally commit. Whatever the person's motive, all the court wanted to know was whether there was a criminal act and whether it was committed intentionally by the defendant. Sentencing was of course a different matter - the nature and circumstances of the offence, motivation, the defendant's character, police records and social enquiry reports could all be taken into account when deciding the form of retribution. The introduction of motivation into the process was not about sentencing - it effectively created a new crime.
It is important that motive should be disregarded in the matter of criminal liability because in a free society the law punishes acts not thoughts. You can only be held responsible for what you do, not what you think, believe or want. Only those acts which are harmful are prohibited. While there are many types of harm recognised by the criminal law, in recent years, the category of mental harm has unfortunately been much expanded. While harm originally centred on the disruption of the public peace by threats or abuse, now it becomes distress to one person caused by just about anything. One effect of this is to make words as well as deeds much more susceptible of prosecution. There is also now a tendency to categorise as harmful those acts which persuade or encourage another to commit a harmful act. It is here that we see the expansion of the category of "hate crimes". While you are entitled, in a free society, to hate who you like, it has in many countries now become a crime to incite particular forms of hate. Behind this change lies three very dangerous assumptions - people are not capable of withstanding certain ideas, are not able to think or believe something without acting violently upon it, and are simply not entitled to have one type of belief. Criminalising racial motivation gives direct effect to that last idea. It is a thought crime.
Using the pretext of clamping down on racial hatred (and the argument goes, what right minded person could disagree with this?) the authorities are increasingly sending a message that the state will decide what we can and cannot think. This strikes at the idea of the moral autonomy of the individual which lies at the heart of bourgeois democratic society. Sensible human beings are, in this world view - treated like a bunch of zombies ready to be activated by some inflammatory language before marching off to commit an atrocity. Encouragement of a particular view thus becomes a crime because it might 'lead to' violence.
In reality, the roots of racist violence and other forms of bigotry lie deep in any oppressive and exploitative society. To address them requires the fullest possible freedom - and thus opposition to the creeping menace of hate and thought crimes.
Russell