Can we ever define what hate is?
Should hate crime laws be in place?
Are hate crimes an epidemic in the United States?
Should hate crime law be in place?
I personally think that hate crime laws should not be in place. I believe that hate crime laws actually keep in standard that there is a difference between people of different color or backgrounds when in reality we are all human. Why should we have a law that makes it so there is a difference between human beings? The moment when those diff ended are so blurred to the eye, that is when racism will end. Also hate can be loosely defined and someone can receive a feloney crime for something that was purely motivated by outside circumstances. An example of this is the story of the gay man and the grass clippings in the article. That man was probably going after the gay man not because he was gay, but because he sprayed him with a hose. With all that being said no one can 100% know what his pure motivation was and it is not up to a judge to figure that out especially when it is so hard to see in this situation. I do think that in some instances hate crime laws may give the lazy racis the point of where he does not want to commit the crime because of the punishment but at the same time we are losing that opportunity to preach that everyone is the same rather than different. If i was a kid and stumbled upon hate crime laws I would be confused. For example if white little mike hits black little bobby in the sandbox and he gets an extra 10 minutes of time out because the kid that he hit was black, little mike would think that for some reason bobby is different than him and that is not a good thing for actually fighting discrimination at the whole.
Yeah, I agree with you. Hate is too vague to define what it is as Andrew Sullivan mentioned his essay; there are many human feelings transformed to hate. However, I think we should not give up preventing any discrimination from now on. And, hate crime is more denounced by public outcry through the Internet these days which means there might be some prevention to decrease of possibilities of any hate crime.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you. The longer we establish that people are different based on their race, sex, religion, etc. then we'll continue to have the prejudices against those people exist. In order for us to completely abolish hate in the sense of racism we must realize that we are all part of the human race, which is bigger than any individual one. Good example of Mike and Bobby in the sandbox too, definitely true.
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