Hate Crimes
Researchers have found that violent crime typically involves a victim and an offender of the same race. A disproportionately high number of all murders involve a black offender and a black victim, and most other murders involve a white offender and a white victim. In 1998, only 10 percent of murders crossed racial lines; three-fifth of those cross-racial murders involved a black offender and a white victim. Hate crimes are offenses in which victims are singled out because of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender. Assaults, vandalism and intimidation against such victims are especially terrifying because the victims are aware that they were chosen because of their characteristics. By evoking a more general fear in the targeted groups, hate crimes reinforce existing patterns of oppression. The number of organized hate groups has increased in recent years, partly as a result of the ease with which their messages are spread through World Wide Web sites. However fewer than 5 percent of all hate crimes are committed by organized hate groups; a study in Boston found that the typical offenders are "young white males- teenagers acting in groups of two, three or four who went out together on a Saturday
If a black man beats a woman to death, it is just as much a crime and just as much an atrocity if a white man beats a woman to death. As integration makes its way to the suburbs, this pattern is likely to follow. The 1980s witnessed the rapid disappearance of homogeneous white enclaves within large cities, with the attendant surge in urban hate crime. According to Murphy, "There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which has never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. The Court ruled that there is no absolutist protection for symbolic speech. The Supreme Court ruled that the statute did not differentiate between public and private draft card burnings, and was therefore not a government attempt to regulate symbolic speech, but a constitutionality legitimate police power. Ignorance and censorship, oppression and tyranny, this is what a Hate Crime Law is. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), the Aryan Nations, the National Alliance, and the Identity church movement have existed for many years and have long been associated with acts of violence. In 1998, thirty-nine states had penalty-enhancement laws that punishment hate crimes more severely that similar offenders not motivated by bias. Supreme Court ruled that the government court not prohibit speech, even hate speech, on the basis of its content, but the following year it held unanimously that it was constitutional to punish crimes motivated by bias more harshly than crimes not motivated by bias. (Levin and McDevitt, 1998: A15)In 1992, the I. Some may argue, though, that comparing Hate Crime Laws to Race Crime Laws (such as having a stiffer penalty for Africans or Hispanics) is a false analogy. I oppose it not because I am a Racist nor because I am a Homophobe, but because I believe in liberty and freedom, and I believe that men and women should be allowed to create their own opinions without the government making these gross violations of our rights.
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Acceptance Essays
