Hate crime laws send the wrong message
Texas had no hate crimes law on the books when James Byrd Jr. was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. Nor did Wyoming when Matthew Shepard was tied to a fence and beaten to death. And that, Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and others claim, is why a federal hate crimes law must be enacted.
"Crimes that are motivated by hate really are fundamentally different," Clinton said on Monday after meeting with Byrd's sister and nephew, "and I believe should be treated differently under the law." Kennedy, chief sponsor of the broad hate crimes measure that passed the Senate on Tuesday, argued that it would help "define what this nation ought to be - that is, a nation that is going to be free from discrimination, hatred, and bigotry."
Perhaps Clinton and Kennedy believe that an applicable hate crimes law might have prevented the Byrd and Shepard murders. How, then, do they explain Buford Furrow? California, like 41 other states, already has a hate crimes law, but that didn't stop Furrow from opening fire last August on a group of Jewish children in a Los Angeles community center, then killing a Filipino-American letter carrier. Illinois's hate crime law didn't deter Benjamin Smith from a shooting spree that left nine people wounded and two dead - all Jewish, black, or Asian.
Perhaps Clinton and Kennedy keep invoking Byrd and Shepard because they believe that a hate crimes law would have ensured that the murderers in those cases were vigorously prosecuted.
But that can't be it, either. Of the three men who so savagely killed Byrd, two have been sentenced to death and one is to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Both of Shepard's killers have also been sentenced to life. One of them, Aaron McKinney, was facing a death sentence when Shepard's parents proposed a deal - two life sentences in exchange for a permanent gag order that prevents McKinney or his lawyers from ever appealing the verdict or discussing the case in public. In the Buford Furrow case, meanwhile, federal prosecutors in California are seeking the death penalty.
So what is it about the Byrd and Shepard atrocities that Clinton, Kennedy, and the others are convinced requires a vast expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction? The sheer, shocking evil of those attacks? Undoubtedly what happened in Jasper, Texas, and Laramie, Wyo., were horrors to freeze the blood. But were they more horrible than John Wayne Gacy's serial murder of 33 young men and boys in the 1970s? Than Timothy McVeigh's butchery in Oklahoma City, which sent 168 innocents to their deaths? Than the mailed bombs Ted Kaczynski used to kill three people and leave 23 others wounded and maimed? Those, too, were abominations of heart-stopping brutality - yet none would qualify as a "hate crime."
Kennedy argues that hate crimes are in a category of their own. They "wound not only the individual, but they also wound and scar a community," he said on the floor of the Senate. Of course that is true, but it is true of all violent crime. Every murder - every rape - every mugging - victimizes more than just the victim himself. Which gives you the worse scare - the robber who pulls a gun on your neighbor up the street or the bigot across town who beats up a stranger because of his color, religion, or sexual orientation, which happens to be the same as yours?
"We have had enough of Matthew Shepard cases," Kennedy says. "We have had enough of the kinds of vicious murders based on race."
What can this mean? That we have not yet had enough of cases in which men who aren't gay are tied to a fence, beaten, and left to die? That we have not yet had enough of murders that aren't based on race? Is it only certain kinds of murders of which we have had enough?
Of course Kennedy - who knows from sad experience what murder can do to a family - would never consciously claim that some forms of murder are more acceptable than others. But that is the unmistakable implication of his words. More important, it is the unmistakable implication of hate crimes laws.
There is no way around it: A law that cracks down harder on criminals who harm members of certain groups by definition goes easier on those who target victims from other groups. If a gang of skinheads decides to crack some black or Jewish skulls, Kennedy's bill would empower federal prosecutors to go after them. If they decide to simply crack skulls at random - or to go after illegal immigrants or fat people or dwarfs or businessmen - Kennedy's bill leaves them alone.
"Equal protection of the laws must apply to all Americans," Kennedy said during the Senate debate. "That's what this is all about."
No, what this is all about is precisely the opposite. Equal protection means telling all would-be criminals that they will be punished fully, regardless of the identity of their victims. The bad bill passed by the Senate declares that some victims are more deserving than others. That is not a message that should be allowed to stand.
