2005 October 26 | Intellectual Conservative Politics and Philosophy

Hate-crime Laws and Evolutionary Tyranny

By Selwyn Duke, on October 26th, 2005

I hate hate-crime laws.� And so should you.

The insidious thing about evolutionary tyranny is that it’s only as visible as the people are perceptive.� It doesn’t beat you over the head like the iron fist of a despot or sweep you aside like a wave of revolution, but, rather, is a death by a thousand doses of bad medicine that makes benign neglect seem utopian.�

One example of this brand of tyranny is the proliferation of hate-crime laws in the Western World.� The very concept of hate-crime law itself is an offense against freedom and, as such, is quintessentially un-American.� Yes, I hate hate-crime laws.� And so should you.

The main problem with hate-crime law is that it is an effort at thought-control masquerading as legitimate criminal-justice legislation.� Let’s examine why this is so.

Consider this example: two identical illegal acts are committed; the perpetrator of one is motivated by hate, whereas the perpetrator of the other is motivated by good old greed.� I’ll call the latter Mr. Greed and the former Mr. Hate.� The punishment deemed appropriate for Mr. Greed is ten years in prison, but the punishment visited upon Mr. Hate is twenty years up the river because his crime was motivated by his namesake.�

Now, let’s analyze the reason for this disparity between their sentences.� Obviously, the law determined that the act itself warranted ten years in prison because that’s what was received by Mr. Greed when only the nature of the act was taken into consideration.� So, this begs the question, since the two men committed the same act, what were the extra ten years imposed in Mr. Hate’s case for?� They could only have been for one thing: the thoughts that motivated the act or were expressed through it.�

So, now the government has been appointed both clairvoyant and arbiter of the acceptability of thoughts, bringing us one giant step closer to an Orwellian nightmare in which the state plays God, reading and judging minds and hearts and damning people based on its determinations.� What’s next, “Bless me Big Brother for I have sinned; I have had proscribed thoughts?”� The truth is that the government should punish actions, not motivations.

Now, some will counter that there is precedent for punishing thoughts because we already do so when distinguishing between certain categories of crime, but this is a fallacy.� For instance, the distinctions between first and second-degree murder involve evaluation of whether or not there was intent to kill, not what motivated one to have that intent.� The law makes a distinction between intent and motive, and while motive can help establish intent, it is rarely considered when determining punishment.� Moreover, when it is, it’s always a mitigating factor, not an aggravating one.�

Then there’s the matter of murders inspired by passion, which are viewed as manslaughter.� While this charge carries a lesser sentence still, it’s not because of motive.� Rather, the judgment has been made that the circumstances preceding the killing were of the kind that would cause a reasonable person to become mentally or emotionally disturbed.� So, the critical point here is that what’s being evaluated in such cases are not thoughts, but emotional state.�

Regardless, none of these examples involve the punishment of those who entertain a given type of thoughts.� This is because even when thoughts were at issue, they did not cause more punishment to be rendered, but less.� Moreover, there is a profound difference between having mercy on those who were compelled by common frailties and visiting Draconian punishment on those in the grip of politically-incorrect ones.�

Ironically, while part of the supposed purpose of hate-crime legislation is to combat prejudice and discrimination, it is the very embodiment of it.� After all, there are seven deadly sins: sloth, gluttony, lust, envy, pride, greed and wrath (hate), and this legislation discriminates by placing an undue onus on those who exhibit the one that is most out of fashion.� �

Why is hate being turned into our national boogeyman?� Well, the social-engineers have deemed that hate — and dreaded permutations of it, such as “racism” — are the end all and be all, the source of all our ills, as they formulate their very own hierarchy of sin.� Of course, lust would never find a prominent place on the totem pole, since the libertine formulators in question have tried to turn the exercise of it into a national pastime.� Nor would envy strike them as something bedeviling us, since it infuses their souls and animates their schemes to redistribute wealth.� But their version of hate is the bee in their bonnet; so much so, that they don’t see the forest for the trees.� After all, if crime is at issue, the focus should be on that which probably constitutes ninety-five percent of all crime: greed-crime.� Incidentally, this brings to mind a pearl of wisdom from a rather highly regarded and widely sold book: “The lust for money is the root of all evil.”

Hate-crime laws also facilitate discrimination, as they provide ideological prosecutors with a vehicle through which members of groups that are out of favor socially can be hammered with disproportionate punishment.� For a crime isn’t a hate-crime until it is judged so, and this judgment often reflects the prejudices of the arbiters more than it does reality.� For instance, if a crime is white on black or straight on homosexual, it’s far more likely that it will be labeled a hate-crime than a scenario involving the reverse.

One example of this is the very different treatment of the Matthew Sheppard and Jesse Derkhising cases.� The quite notorious Sheppard case involved two men who murdered a homosexual, while the Derkhising case involved two homosexuals who tortured and murdered a 13-year-old boy.� However, while the Sheppard case became a cause célebre in the effluent-stream media and was labeled a hate-crime, young Derkhising was barely a blip on the radar screen.

And this brings to light another odious aspect of this topic.� Because the effluent-stream media determine what events and causes will see the light of day and how they will be cast, they’re instrumental in shaping the perception of criminal acts.� Yes, the media’s biases determine the content and nature of coverage, and this serves to put pressure on authorities and shape their thinking, and this, in turn, means that those biases will be reflected in the treatment of crime.� � �

These biases in the media will shape punishment.� But think about it: if one of your loved ones was killed for his money and his murderer received a lesser sentence than someone who killed motivated by “hate,” would you find the relative slap-on-the-wrist palatable because your loved one died for a politically-correct reason?� And, if someone else were in those mournful shoes, would you want to be the one charged with the task of explaining to him that the lesser punishment was justifiable because the motivation for his loved one’s murder was more “acceptable?”� If you would answer no, you cannot in good conscience support these misbegotten laws.

Far more distressing than anything I’ve mentioned, though, are the social changes that are both a cause and an effect of the hate-crime philosophy.� Remember, laws don’t emerge in a vacuum, rather, they are an expression of the collective values of a society.� And pondering this reminds me of an experience I had earlier this year.

After speaking about so-called racial-profiling at the World Affairs Conference in Toronto, Canada, I learned that certain elements of my presentation didn’t sit too well with a student in attendance.� You see, some representatives of the host institution were kind enough to apprise me of the fact that he found certain comments of mine “offensive.”� Although I forged on undeterred with the same speech and approach during the second session, the fact that sensitivity-police are no longer uncommon should give us all pause for thought.�

You see, what does the fact that students would lodge such complaints mean in terms of social change?� Well, I’m not that old, but in “my day” it wasn’t uncommon to hear the adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.”� Of course, we all know that sharp words can cut hearts, but this principle was, nevertheless, a good one to bear in mind.� After all, we don’t want to raise children who are so thin-skinned that they can’t cope and whose self-image hinges on others’ estimation of them.� More importantly, however, the saying also implicitly transmits the message that it’s a given that people are free to say what they wish, even if it’s not what we wish.� And freedom of speech must be a given if we are to remain a free land.

Ominously, though, that erstwhile ubiquitous old saying has fallen by the wayside, supplanted by psycho-babble that casts “hate-speech” as the ultimate sin.� Mind you, it’s not as if the school officials in question seek merely to root out meanness across the board and encourage civility and charity; this would be just fine.� No, what they are doing is cherry-picking speech from the realms of both illegitimate and legitimate discourse and earmarking them for demonization.� And, of course, the only thing these examples of speech — the good, the bad and the ugly — have in common is that they’re politically-incorrect.

And it has taken hold.� I remember some years ago a student of mine telling me that one shouldn’t be allowed to use hateful words.� And sadly, his is not an unusual belief among those weaned on a steady diet of leftist tripe.� These youth have been transformed into good, unthinking foot soldiers for the left and have been conditioned to mistake facile analyses for intellectualism and the embrace of the spirit of the age for sophistication.� They blindly accept the dogma that hate should be criminalized and the dogma that hate is whatever the social-engineers say it is.� And when you have enough such obedient dogmatists and they reach voting age, you no longer have a free nation.

This is why we see our neighbor in the great white north descending into what can rightly be called fascism.� You see, Canada is proceeding down the hate-speech road, and its rather heavy-handed, euphemistically-named “Human Rights Tribunals” have assiduously been imposing an orthodoxy upon the people.� Case in point: in 2003 Hugh Owens of Regina, Saskatchewan, was found guilty of “inciting hatred” and was forced to pay 1,500 Canadian Dollars to each of three homosexual men who filed a complaint against him.� His “crime?”� He took out a newspaper advertisement that included four Bible citations pertaining to homosexuality.�

Then there was the 2002 case of Mark Harding, a man who committed the unpardonable sin of distributing pamphlets in which he was critical of Islam.� A Canadian court sentenced Harding to two years probation and community service under the direction of one Mohammad Ashraf, general secretary of the Islamic Society of North America.� His service involved being indoctrinated with Islamic ideas by Ashraf, who emphasized that if Harding said anything negative about Islam or its prophet Muhammad or failed to follow Ashraf’s instructions, he would be sent back to prison.

Of course, we are all so sure this could never happen here.� We have our First Amendment guaranteeing us freedom of speech, after all.� But with Ginsbergesque Supreme Court Justices embracing the notion that our Constitution can be interpreted in light of international law, it may just be a matter of time.� For, there are deeds, words and thoughts, and the ultimate goal of any fervent social-engineer is to gain control over the last of those.� Punishing thoughts as expressed through action — otherwise known as hate-crime laws — is the first step.� Now all you have to do is finish the progression; the next logical move is to punish the most direct expression of thoughts: speech.� This is why this pattern of moving toward an Orwellian oblivion should be broken.�

Hate-crime laws should be abolished.� Hate them, hate them with a burning fire of a thousand suns.� For, to hate them is to love freedom.

Selwyn Duke’s homepage is The Truth Page.

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Rabbi Dearest

By Janet Tassel, on October 26th, 2005

Rabbi Dearest, knowing you as I do, I have every confidence that even without prodding from above, you will welcome and embrace my marriage — to my brother.

Rabbi Dearest,

As you know, I have a brother, long divorced, whom I adore. But, though he hates to admit it, he is not financially as secure as I am, and as we age he’s beginning to worry about his future, materially, medically — you know the particulars.� We’ve talked, consulted experts, and accumulated piles of spreadsheets. And then finally, we came to a decision.

We have decided to get married.

Apparently, as we understand it, only then will he be eligible for the estimated 100-plus financial and legal benefits that come with marriage, as so often enumerated by the homosexual-marriage lobby.

Perhaps you’ve met my brother at family functions.� If so, you’ll remember what a charmer he is, how funny, how sensitive, how intelligent.� What I am asking of you is that you consecrate this marriage.� I ask more: that you celebrate our union and welcome us into the congregation with the warmth and affection for which you are so justly well-known in the gay community.� For of course, ours too will be a somewhat irregular union.� I’m not saying abnormal, of course, because you have forbidden that “hate” word.

Now, you will say, what about Dan, my current (and beloved) husband? How does he feel about this? Here I must admit I need your counsel.� My own feeling is that my having two loving husbands would work.� For one thing, the three of us are beyond child-bearing age, and more important, we are all Jewish.� It would never have occurred to me to make such an unprecedented request of you had I not heard your inspiring sermon last year, when you proclaimed your embrace of non-traditional marriages. You said then that you would not officiate at interfaith marriages, but — especially as the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in its wisdom had just declared homosexual marriage legal — you were more than happy to join in matrimony two people of the same sex — as long as they were both Jewish.� You said, and I hope I’m quoting accurately, “If they are both Jewish, and so part of the Jewish community, and able to take each other in marriage as Jews, according to the Jewish understanding of marriage, then I can officiate.” I must confess I didn’t quite understand that then, but I think I do now.� You were implying — correct me if I’m wrong — that Jewish texts like Leviticus and the Sidra were hopelessly outmoded, totally irrelevant to today’s lifestyle.� In fact, now I remember: you quoted the rabbinical exegesist, Bob Dylan. With that warm smile of yours, you continued, “We can confidently say, ‘The times, they are a-changing….’”

So it seemed to me, when I reviewed this, and your many succeeding remarks on the subject, not to mention the multiple� public demonstrations you have participated in, that you would be able to take our potential little family under your wing, too.� If there were doubts, I figured perhaps you could consult Rabbi David Saperstein and his colleagues at Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center. These leaders of� Reform Judaism lobby so vigorously in favor of homosexual marriage, while giving the theological boot to the bigots on the religious right, that surely they would accept our loving, if untraditional, family.

But then again, knowing you as I do, I have every confidence that even without prodding from above (no, no, I didn’t say “Above”), you will welcome and embrace our union. I know we’d be received with open arms by our innovative and loving congregation, where the triad of civil rights, social justice, and personal fulfillment has been virtually inscribed on our doorpost.� And so, I would assume that, in this atmosphere of inclusion,� the archaic concept of� taboo, like so many� of our other aboriginal� superstitions, has been banished.

Dear friend and spiritual advisor, as we enter this new year of new beginnings and new hopes, may I trust that you will give some thought to this request? L’shanah tovah!

Janet Tassel is a contributing editor at Harvard Magazine.

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Is the Conservative Movement Dead?

By Vincent Fiore, on October 26th, 2005

If the conservative mandate to govern falters, the Miers nomination will be the watershed moment that will be looked upon as the beginning of the great unraveling.

The question these days around Washington is: How can the Bush Administration recover from such a multitudinous barrage of so much bad news, compounded by even worse coverage of these troubles by an old and agenda-driven media?

That may be what the New York Times is lavishing its ink upon, and what George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are politically — who knows, maybe literally — salivating over, but bedrock conservatives are concerned about something else entirely.

Principally — and that is the optimum word here — conservatives wonder what has happened to the bedrock principles of conservatism that were founded and nurtured during the 1950s through the 1990s?

Has the pioneering work of such conservative icons as Buckley, Reagan, and Gingrich gone for naught, in this, the beginning of what was supposed to be GOP dominance for decades to come?� Right now, the political reality would seem to say exactly that.

Reinforcing this belief — or head-shaking disbelief — among conservatives and Republicans in general recently were two of its most astute and prolific members, Robert Bork and Bruce Bartlett.

Barely a week ago, former Judge Robert Bork, who has one of the most fertile legal minds in the country, penned a scathing critique against President Bush’s choice for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers.

In his article, Bork not only pans Harriet Miers as having no redeeming qualities for the highest court of the land, but Bork also speaks to the larger issue for conservatives — and I would include myself in this — that being the fracturing of the conservative movement. Says Bork:

With a single stroke…the president has…widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That’s not a bad day’s work — for liberals.� The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values.

In the article written by former Reaganite and Heritage Foundation fellow Bruce Bartlett, the reader was greeted with this singular item that went directly to the heart of the argument: “The truth that is now dawning on many movement conservatives is that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been.”

Bartlett then goes on to list what can only be described as a litany of offenses against conservatives perpetrated by Bush, and the foundation and ideals of conservatism, and its principles.

The apex of the offense to conservatives is without question the elevating of Harriet Miers as a nominee to the Supreme Court.� If Bush persists in pushing Miers, or if Miers does not have the clear sense to withdraw her nomination, it is a pulsating and strengthening reality that the inconsolable fragments of the Conservative and Republican Party will simply stay home come Election Day.

In this, I would agree.� The possibility of Republicans staying home in 2006 and 2008 grows larger everyday.� President Bush has been praised for his absolute loyalty to his friends, and more specifically, his White House staff.

But where is his loyalty to the millions who were willing to forgive such “unconservative” governance like Campaign Finance Reform, and the Medicare Drug benefit bill, or letting the liberal lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, author the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001?

The GOP electorate was willing to forgive and overlook such liberal-like behavior, because the domestic issue of our lives has been — and will be — the courts that hold such sway over our lives through its activism.

In regard to Miers, electing to opt for loyalty and stealth over originalism and judicial breadth has shown that President Bush has not seriously considered the wishes of his party.

Even with Judge Roberts, conservatives were asked to trust Bush, and so they did.� Now, they are asked to do so again, only with a nominee so vacant and bare in the confines of judicial philosophy and constitutional law that some GOP senators are actually asking the White House for more paperwork on Miers, and citing her answers to written Senate questions as “inadequate”

If President Bush will not withdraw Miers as a nominee, or Miers will not or does not have the grace and sense to know that she stands at a crossroad of conservatism, then the GOP en masse must persuade Bush to act, and the persuasion must be swift, and definitive.� � �

But the “persuasive act” may be one of severe consequences.� If conservatives opt to stay home next November, then Democrats — who even now openly gloat over their electoral prospects — will capture seats in both chambers of Congress.

More importantly, Democrats will unquestionably seize the momentum going into the 2008 presidential election.

The only way I see around this scenario is to tell the president, and the Republican elite in Washington in no uncertain terms, that staying home is exactly what will happen…by design.� If the Republican majority in Washington cannot unite around true conservative values and principles — the Supreme Court being the most obvious and pressing — then perhaps the GOP needs to spend another few decades wondering the political wilderness in order to rediscover its roots all over again.�

It took over 40 years to regain the House of Representatives, and now Republicans may lose it along with the Senate chamber, and ultimately the presidency.� While Bush has been stellar in his foreign policy endeavors, he has been well less than that in regard to domestic issues.

The Supreme Court is the one issue that casts a large and politically supranational authority into the future, and it is here that conservatives recognize that the real ideals of conservatism must begin; for when you here the words “traditionalism,” or “originalists,” or even “constitutionalist,” associated with a prospective jurist, they are just code for conservatism.

If the conservative mandate to govern into the foreseeable future falters, the Miers nomination will be the watershed moment in this current history that will be looked upon as the beginning of the great conservative unraveling.

Vincent Fiore contributes commentary for several web sites on a weekly basis, and occasionally has commentary posted on NewsMax.com. Your comments are always welcomed.

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