I am against hate crime laws. What is worse to you Duane that a white man beat up a black man or a black man beating up another black man? Like the Six Flags incident this summer. Black teens almost beat another black teen to death. Where are Sharprton & Jackson and where is the outrage among the black community? Sadly had it been whites doing the same it would still be making the rounds on the news. A crime is a crime regardless of what you are thinking while you are doing it.

What does thought have to do with it?

I think the difference in what we are arguing is the crime, not the punishment. Since there is no hate crimes legislation, it has to be determined what kind of crime it should fall under, which leads to it being misrepresented in many cases. Also, having these laws, again, sets a precedent; sometimes all you need is the threat of action to motivate some people to stop doing something wrong.

Maigh, if the site puts it up there as a headline, they are responsible for it. What I say on my site, regardless of where I got it from, is representative of my site; just because I say that others wanted to read it doesn’t make it less representative of me or my site. But I definitely see what you mean; people want to hear that drivel, and that’s why it is there. Sigh…

I’d also like to point out that this was one of many stories on the front page, and that this one is categorized under “Hot Topics” because it was voted on by the readers.

You (the big you, not you you) are responsible for the drivel delivered fresh to your plate daily. People vote up the Olsen twins, that’s what you’re gonna get.

Thank your fellow readers, or bash the program behind the scenes that lets them vote on articles. Bashing the site, the editors or the reporters misses the mark.

Just sayin’.

…we legislate how the parents would feel…

Oops. Meant to say “legislate based on how the parents would feel”.

Dave, I don’t think the point has anything to do with what “your parents” vs. what “my parents” would think about punishment; it is about the person being punished justly for the severity of the crime they committed[...]

Well, I don’t think Dave was advocating that we legislate how the parents would feel, but rather offering an interesting thought exercise. And his point seemed to be that there is a certain victim depreciation that goes on where, broken down to its most basic level, certain victims are simply “worth” more than others when it comes to the exact same crime. Now, we already make this decision in society when it comes to certain professions. I believe killing cops and judges gets you an automatic “murder one” in many states, and I think this is somewhat justified due to their position in society. However, I’m not so quick to say that a victim is “worth” more because he’s of a different race, sexual orientation, etc.

There seems to be little doubt that the killers at Columbine were motivated by their hatred for jocks and the popular crowd that had mistreated them throughout their years in school. Klebold and Harris were, then, committing hate crimes when they went on their murder spree. However, there’s no federally defined category of discrimination that protects jocks, and there probably never will be, so the occurrence of this type of crime will not be affected in any way by hate crime legislation. I think this is illustrative of the difficulties you introduce into the system when you try to protect certain groups of victims by giving them special status in the legal system.

Dave, I don’t think the point has anything to do with what “your parents” vs. what “my parents” would think about punishment; it is about the person being punished justly for the severity of the crime they committed, AS WELL AS setting the precedent that will prevent future incidents of the same type.

The definition of a hate-crime is vague and punishes unfairly.

Actually, this is not so; hate crimes are defined as crimes that are committed solely based on hate. They are actually difficult to prove, and as such, many times, the criminals receive greatly reduced punishments; where if they crime was committed with planning and execution, they would have been punished more severely. The point of hate crimes legislation is to both close the gap between the severity of non-hate crime planned killing and vicious hate crimes, for the purpose of making sure criminals do not get away with hate crimes, simply because of the argument, “well, wouldn’t they kill anyone?”, because that isn’t the case. Additionally, it is (in my opinion) a main goal of the legislation to set precedent that states on the record, that if you commit this form of crime, your punishment will be severe, which is, in and of itself, enough to curtail many of those that would commit such crimes in the first place. I think that it would do nothing but clarify and solidify the definition of what is and what isn’t hate crime, for the betterment of all minorities.

The REASON hate crime legislation is important, is because of all of the hate related crimes that have ALREADY been committed, where the offenders were not afraid of “what would happen to them” if they brutally killed someone, as well as the fact that many of them got off with lessened punishment.

That seems naïve to me. The killers of James Byrd and Matthew Shepard committed their crimes in states where the legal penalties for murder already included the death penalty. Do you really think that hate crime legislation would have caused them to lay down their weapons and back off?

My point is, let’s say you and I were out drinking one night and some guy walks up, calls you a butt-fucking faggot piece of shit and then shoot and proceeds to shoot both of us in the head. He’s caught and goes to trial for two separate counts of first degree murder. How do you think my family is going to feel if he gets 20 years for my death and 50 years for your death on the grounds of it being a hate-crime? Does that seem fair to you?

I don’t care why someone intentionally kills another person. There is obviously something wrong with that person that caused them to kill. Do you think a white guy that would kill a black dude simply for being black wouldn’t also kill a white person for something else?

The definition of a hate-crime is vague and punishes unfairly.

If you kill someone accidentally in a car crash, vs. you hate black people so much that you personally beat a man to death and then desecrate his body; you really believe these people should be punished equally?

Ah, but those are already separate crimes, so the analogy doesn’t fly. The real analogy would be you beat a man to death and then desecrate his body because he owed you money vs. you beat a man to death and then desecrate his body because you don’t like black people.

If discrimination and bigotry in someone’s mind when they commit a crime are heinous enough to warrant a new category, why aren’t you pushing to make it illegal to hate a certain group?