This past weekend, a pair of homeowners in the Warehouse District awoke
to find spayed onto a painted shutter a term some find derogatory in reference
to those who practice homosexuality, and stolen a flag symbolizing the same,
some of which was caught on video recordings. Both are visible advocates for increased
legitimizing by government of homosexual lifestyles, one having recently
written an opinion
piece in the local media decrying alleged civil rights violations in state
public policy. No doubt because of that visibility, and perhaps because one owner
for decades was a fixture in the state’s media who now heads an advocacy group,
local media covered the very minor crime where others of the same kind almost
always draw a yawn.
But that it provided extensive coverage of the event – much more than for
most far more serious crimes – may have been the lure that it constituted a “hate
crime.” New Orleans defines
that as “an act or omission defined as an offense by city ordinance other
than this section, or by state or federal law, a motive for the commission of
which is the actual or perceived race, age, religion, color, creed, disability,
gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry of that person or the
owner or occupant of that property.” It is a secondary offense ties to another where
the penalty recommended is the maximum of the primary offense and includes
mandatory behavioral counseling.
Unfortunately, the hate crime concept is widely dispersed among legal
codes despite having little
rationality or logic behind it, as it brings in a matter irrelevant to the
harm, motive, that prompts a harsher penalty that, because of that irrelevancy,
does nothing to deter commission of the primary crime. And because of the psychological
tendency to think that the greater the penalty, the more serious the crime that
therefore garners more attention, since there is no original deterrent present,
every incentive is there to use the concept as a cudgel against a disliked set
of political beliefs.
While among the many reported instances
of fakery here had the false assertion stemming from some kind of personal
agenda, some of these do have political motives. This kind of shilling for an
agenda, by drawing negative attention to an opposing set of views in order to
delegitimize it by staging a “hate crime” supposedly derived from those views, is
made more attractive by being able to designate the faux act by that label and privileged legal status. These laws and
they alone cause this unnecessary distress to society’s consciousness and waste
taxpayer resources in needless investigation, creating the additional crime of
false reporting.
Yet of far more serious concern is the easy way in which these laws can
cross over into suppressing free expression concerning political ideas that
harm no one. For example, another
New Orleans ordinance makes illegal, as part of disturbing the peace the interrupting
of “any lawful assembly of people by the use of words where such words, by their very utterance, inflict injury”
(emphasis mine). And just how does government decide on “such words” that attain
a status of such inherent worthlessness as speech and become so negative that
by definition they rise to the level of disturbing the peace?
It’s not difficult to realize how easy it would be for government to
fuse hate crime standards onto this and to prosecute free speech, and very
selectively. What if the authorities decided, for example, that to advocate against
same-sex marriage was a use of words that inflicted injury? Actually, one of
the owners in his column equated this opposition, when translated into public
policy, with “intent to do harm” to those who wanted to partake in the act
legally. Having the notion that criminality is attached to “bad” motives which have
spring from “bad” ideas only makes it easier for government to constantly broaden
its controls over those ideas it may consider unacceptable for whatever reason,
and thereby to squelch ideas its elites define as offensive.
And it can do so quite selectively, as it consistently shows. Decades
ago, certain racial slurs were common but today are considered hostile to the
point they would be subject to the New Orleans disturbing of the peace definition.
Yet (as explained
by the words quoted here of an idiot
savant) their usage is not only condoned by government, but celebrated by a
portion of the mass public, when from
entertainers of a certain skin color. So what guarantee is there in the future
that government won’t support certain favored groups in society who seek to
punish any non-member who elucidates ideas they deem offensive, buoyed by this
notion legitimized by the hate crime concept that thoughts without any action attached
to them still are harmful nonetheless?
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