Hate crimes (also known as bias motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.
Hate crime can take many forms. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters.
I firmly believe that all crimes are base in hate, so why do we really need this law, I believe that we don’t. This type of law makes us more of a victim then we really are. By asking for and pushing for a passage of a law of this type we are telling others that we are weak that we need to be protect more than others.
These laws only add in many case five years to a sentence, it tells why a person was attack; however the real crime gets push in the background. All we hear it that a person was a victim of a hate crime, ok but what was the real crime, was the person attack with a knife, were they shot, hit with a blunt object. These are the crimes that really matters, not the motivation behind the attack.
Each of these crimes is covered under current laws already, it is these laws that need to be enforce and apply equally. These laws are the laws that we need to make sure that the local DA apply and enforce equally no matter who the victim is.
Asking for more so-call special laws to protect a class is just wrong.
from wiki,
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found that hate crime statutes which criminalize bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech conflict with free speech rights because they isolated certain words based on their content or viewpoint.
Some have argued hate crime laws bring the law into disrepute and further divide society, as groups apply to have their critics silenced. Some have argued that if it is true that all violent crimes are the result of the perpetrator's contempt for the victim, then all crimes are hate crimes. Thus, if there is no alternate rationale for prosecuting some people more harshly for the same crime based on who the victim is, then different defendants are treated unequally under the law, which violates the United States Constitution. To try to isolate motivation in cases such as rape and murder to fit into one of two categories is ridiculous. The victims in either case suffer the same result. To legislate different penalties based upon a changing definition of what constitutes hate criminalizes thought and not actions.
In a free society, one's thoughts and ideas should be protected even if they offend the sensitivities of other groups. It’s when a physical crime is perpetrated, regardless of the motivation, that the same punishment should be enforced.
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