We must no longer let ignorance justify hate crimes

Sacramento Bee ^ | January 5, 2016 | Mallika Kaur

[artichokegrower]

For too long, ignorance has been the excuse for hate crimes.

It does not require a Sikh-American expert to explain what’s wrong with the beating of 68-year-old Amrik Singh Bal in Fresno the day after Christmas. It certainly does not require a theologian to understand the immorality in gunning down parishioners or bombing a mosque.

[artichokegrower]

The other day, a Jeep abruptly cut into my lane on a busy highway, the two men inside bent on having their obnoxious gestures acknowledged. The men could see that I am brown and that I am a woman. They didn’t have to know about feminism to know their actions were disrespectful. That was precisely their intention.

Maybe you are a crappy driver.

[driftdiver]

Because without the racial component its an act of love to beat someone?

[skeeter]

I’ll start listening to journalists crying about hate crimes when they include ALL victims, not just ones the writer personally identifies with.

[CharlesOConnell]

I support 2nd Amend. Immigration restricts. Though they aren’t my political core. But after 9-11 I learned that I would get the shit beat out of myself by guys roaring around in monster trucks with 2 gigantic American flags in the back, numerous instances of them, looking for anyone in a turban or Arabic looking.

[Excellence]

But that isn’t what is making murderers. It’s something else – and we should say its name.

Okay, I will. Islam.

[Gunpowder green]

There are plenty of laws against assault as it is, “hate crime” augmentations are unnecessary, redundant, unequally applied, and deny equal protection under the law.

The whole idea should be scrapped. If someone is assaulted, prosecute the perp for assault... it’s not rocket science.

[hal ogen]

“Hate” crimes are hate crimes. Leftist idiocy and hypersensitivity produces them at their whim. What a malignant and pathetic joke on Freedom. I hate hate crimes.

[VeniVidiVici]

Good to see a person of color finally denouncing these senseless black on white crimes aka ‘the knockout game’.

/s

[Paal Gulli]

All right-thinking and liberty-conscious individuals should find hate crime laws abhorrent in principle.

One could make the argument that every violent crime shows prima facie evidence of some measure of hate. Categorizing some violent crimes (or indeed any crime) as hate-motivated and not others presumes to know the private thoughts of the perpetrator, which necessarily requires the services of a thought police.

Thoughts are not “discoverable” in the legal sense because there is no and can be no direct “proof” of them. Even one’s own words and deeds at best still and forever will remain only an indirect indication of one’s thoughts. And if a thing is not provable, neither is it disprovable. Ergo the establishment of a category of crimes based on thoughts is the first step toward enabling the Demoncrats to criminalize any behavior of which they do not approve, be it denying MMGW, failing to vote for Demoncrat causes and or candidates, or the intentional killing of any animal so that it might then be consumed by humans, and you are left powerless to defend against it.

Besides, liberals are the most hate-filled people I know, a condition which they conveniently will overlook in favor of prosecuting those who show disdain for any of their myriad lunatic causes.