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There Oughta' Be a Law!
I found this troubling photo while researching proposed hate-crime legislation.
The link claims "funny." I sense hatred.
BTW, here's Steve Chapman explaining why federal hate-crime laws are nothing but empty symbolism.
The link claims "funny." I sense hatred.
BTW, here's Steve Chapman explaining why federal hate-crime laws are nothing but empty symbolism.
posted by Spencerblog at
7:32 AM
6 Comments:
Obviously, the federal hate crimes law is a superfluous, feel-good exercise by spineless legislators unwilling and unable to address the nation's real problems.
But in this era of politically correct hypersensitivity, with victimization as the new status symbol, all politics reduced to identity politics, and the thought police twisting every casual comment into a point of contention, we might find ourselves in the most uptight, restricted society in American history.
Ironically, the champions of this nonsense are the very same liberals who marched in the streets for freedom of expression in the sixties and seventies.
This just in...Bob Griese suspended a week by ESPN for saying on air that a Colombian race car driver was "out getting a taco". What a farce!
Jake - Are you saying prejudice and intolerance in this country are not "real problems"? Tell that to the people who were gunned down at the holocaust museum in DC. When violent crimes are motivated by ones inability to tolerate someone else, simply because that other person looks different, thinks different, acts different, or has a disability, unique, and sometimes volatile situations can occur. We are all too familiar with the protests and riots that often result from these crimes. They destroy lives and property, and cost millions. If hate crime legislation becomes a lid on a boiling pot just once, it might not seem so superfluous. Can we agree on that?
As for the Bob Griese situation, why would you object to company exercising it's right to police it's own employees?
Bob,
Why should the motivations of the criminal matter for the crime? Murder is murder and most people who kill do so for strange and twisted reasons.
Why should a crime against a disabled, black lesbian matter more and be subject to harsher penalties than a crime against a white male?
What happened to the fundamental understanding of equal justice under the law?
Now we've moved past quotas and are setting standards for preferential treatment of victims?
That's just wrong.
For ESPN, they are entitled to treat their employees as they see fit, just as I'm entitled, as their customer, to question their judgment. They are a public company making a public announcement using the public airwaves.
For years, we've been told to recognize and tolerate ethnic pride and diversity. Griese makes a casual, inoffensive remark about a taco, a food you can get on every corner in America, and he's suspended.
It's a sad reflection of American sensibilities that someone has to manufacture outrage over that innocuous remark. And ESPN ought to man up and tell these professional apologists to go pound sand.
Jake - First of all, motivation is almost always a consideration in the prosecution of a violent crime. Example 1- A man walks into his home, catches his wife with another man, and kills the man. Crime of passion. Example 2- A man with a dislike of Jewish people walks into a place where Jewish people congregate, and kills someone simply because they are Jewish. Who deserves the harsher penalty? I think you are taking a simplistic view of this issue. A hate crime is different than a crime of passion, or a violent robbery. A hate crime has a tendency to target and terrorize a specific segment of society. The result is quite often more violence and civil discord. Another factor to consider. If, for example, a hate crime takes place in small town America, the town might not have the social, legal, or financial resources to handle what's to come.
This law allows greater assistance from the federal government, financially, legally, and socially.
Bob,
I don't see shooting up a synagogue as any more serious a crime than shooting up any church. Neither should the law. Mitigating circumstances should be decided by judges or juries, not Congress currying favor with its liberal partisans.
Let's call this federal legislation what it is -- pure politics. It is a superfluous feel-good exercise. Democrats are throwing a bone (pun intended) to their gay constituency.
Prosecution of a crime is a power reserved for local and state authorities. 45 states have some sort of hate crimes bump in sentencing for violent felonies. I still dislike knee-jerk legal reactions to special interests, but at least it's being done in the proper venue.
Assistance and/or funding offering "social, legal or financial resources" to small towns are limited to federally protected activities, which represent a negligible portion of these violent offenses.
Again, just another superfluous, feel-good exercise, likely to be quickly overturned by the Supreme Court.
Jake - You said "I don't see shooting up a synagogue as any more serious a crime than shooting up any church." No kidding! And if someone shot up a church because they hated christians, they could be charged with the commission of a hate crime. The same would apply if a group of blacks committed a violent crime against a white person because they hated whites.
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