(chortle!)
Baron Max said:
That means that someone can't hate someone else? That means that someone can't call someone else a nasty name? What does that mean to you, Tiassa, with regard to this issue (now) of freedom of speech.
Why is it, Max, that whenever someone answers one of your arguments, you change the subject and keep pressing?
As to your stupid questions, the answers are pretty simple:
• No.
• No.
Any
real questions, Max?
And yet you still can't explain it. So, let me try to ask it again ....
What is your question? Would I like to explain what, your faulty definitions?
Many people here are trying to make the ...idiotic... connection between hate, an emotion, and action against a person. Bigotry is NOT action! Assault is assault, whether its done against a black or not. Murder is murder regardless of color, religion, etc.
Motive and culpability, Max. You might want to try addressing the point sometime.
Your argument is racist because it focuses on the ethnicity of a victim, and not the motive of the perpetrator.
Plenty of people make bad decisions, Max. Understanding
why is part of understanding what has happened.
Compare two car thefts:
• A sixteen year old girl "borrows" her mother's car without permission, and picks up two friends. She then slides the car into the ditch, requiring a tow truck. The tow truck driver discovers that she does not have a valid license, and calls the police. The police call the mother, who affirms that she did not give her daughter permission to take the car. All three teens are charged with stealing the car.
• The police track a stolen car to a suspected professional car thief and arrest him, charging him with the theft.
They both stole cars. By your logic, the dumb-assed teenager is no different from the professional criminal.
Now, would you give each defendant the same sentence? Why? The professional criminal is much more dangerous to society, and has a much higher potential for repeating his offense than the teenager who "borrowed" her mother's car. And the two friends whose "crimes" were believing their friend (A) had a license and not a learning permit, and (B) had permission to use the car. Send them all away with the hardened criminals? After all, a stolen car is a stolen car, right?
Those for whom the criminal justice system is something more than a societal instrument for vengeance see little purpose in treating the iditotic teenager and the professional criminal the same. Equal treatment before the law, to consider an
earlier argument of yours—
"It seems to me that 'one-size-fits-all' is exactly the way the Constitution intended. And it also seems to me that anything else, like singling out races or religions, etc, as special in accordance with the law, then that's wrong and discriminatory."
—includes an assessment of one's potential for recidivism and danger to the community.
And as I've noted before, we have different standards for other crimes, and those standards often examine motives.
So my question to you, and any other critic of hate crimes, is why bigotry is the one motive we should
not be allowed to consider in charging and sentencing people. Your prior explanation, focusing on the ethnicity of the perpetrator, doesn't work; a white Christian beating up a Jewish man for being Jewish would be treated the same as a black Muslim beating up a Jewish man for being Jewish. As far as I can tell, you're simply arguing to get bigots special rights under the law.
I suppose one possible solution to the conundrum would be to invoke one of the few allowable double-jeopardy circumstances under the Constitution. Convict a person at the state level for the assault, and then again at the federal level for the civil rights violation.
But it's simpler and more efficient to simply laugh at these ultimately stupid campaigns on behalf of bigotry and leave the bigots to their delusions.
