"Hate crimes are incompatible with religious freedom." That’s what I heard a religious rights expert say on the radio the other morning. If it’s an either/or situation, is the most obvious answer not to protect religious freedom – one of the core principles of our nations founding?
The Democrats slipped in a hate crimes amendment to the recent defense spending bill.
I disagree with the entire concept of hate crimes for several reasons. I don’t think the government should criminalize thought. They should not create classes of victims: if someone is murdered for their money and someone else is murdered for their race is the first victim any less dead and the first criminal any less guilty? There is also numerous free speech (and in with the provision for gays: freedom of religion) issues that are raised.
Most of the news articles about this legislation, what little there are, focus on physical violence against gays. The problem is that is already illegal, this amendment does not suddenly criminalize violence against gays or any group. The actions are already criminal acts, the amendment criminalizes the thoughts of the perpetrator.
It also may allow states and the federal government the right to prosecute religious leaders who speak out against gay marriage or other issues involving homosexual rights. I know most gay people do not see any delineation between opposition to gay marriage and opposition to gay individuals, but that again is a case of thought projection. You believe I hate gays because I oppose gay marriage. Neither you or the federal government knows my real thoughts, but they believe they can prosecute me based on their perception of my thoughts.
No one should verbally or physically assault someone for any reason, be they gay, black, hispanic, white, Christian, Jewish, or any other category. Anyone who does those things should be prosecuted, but hate crimes goes far beyond that by granting the government the power to judge our thoughts and intentions. Even if you support this type of hate crimes legislation, surely you can see that it is dangerous to grant the courts and police that type of power. How can you prove you are innocent of thoughts? That is a dangerous thought.
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I think this is a bit misleading. Outlawing "hate speech" is definitely just the liberal equivalant of blasphemy laws – that is, restricting free speech and criticism (and perhaps even mocking humor). It's Islamic rule from the left.
But directly inciting violence (which includes using code words that people understand as permission or commands to commit violence), and acts of violence MUST be considered criminal.
But should a person who murders, for example, with a racial motive be given a worse punishment than the person who murders for, say, money? I don't think so. While premeditation or recklessness may be considered in such cases, motive should not. Intent to harm is intent to harm, no matter what our motives, and the just thing to do is penalize such acts equally, other things being equal.
I agree that we have to be on guard against wiley leftists who want to poison our system with their blasphemy laws, esp. when they try to slip such things in to other legislation. Devious creeps.
Your post echoes what we have been trying to say in other posts like:
Hate Crimes Laws – needed reform or threat to free speech?
Hate speech laws and blasphemy laws – twin evils
Hate Speech and Homosexuality
Idiotic Hate Speech Case
What is Hate?
Hate crimes laws do not police thought; they are enhancements which impose extra punishment on certain types of crimes. I find it interesting that xians fear hate crimes legislation intended to protect gays. Is this an admission that what they are up to is hatred, and not the free expression of their religion?
That being said, I am relatively indifferent to such legislation except that it should be applied equally. Those who oppose it should agitate for the repeal of all hate crimes laws (including those which protect the religious). Otherwise, in all fairness, gays should be included as we are demonstrably more at risk than those in other categories (the religious, for example).
Hate crimes laws do not police thought; they are enhancements which impose extra punishment on certain types of crimes.
That is why i make a distinction between hate CRIMES and hate SPEECH. The latter is a restriction on free speech, and are essentially blasphemy laws.
Now hate CRIMES are still crimes, but whether or not the punishment should be WORSE in such cases I think is debatable, but even if we do that, it is not as dangerous and wrong as criminalizing speech.
Violent crimes are violent crimes – why should you do injustice to the person who was beat up for money than the person beat up for their sexuality – it's unjust, and injustice leads to strife and other injustice.
I think you are right about consistency – I think all hate crimes laws are counter-productive. However, if a crime was committed not only on a person, but with the intent to traumatize or intimidate an entire community (I say INTENT, not actual effect), I could see that getting a stiffer penalty from the judge – but I think such should be the judge's discretion, perhaps not law.
I find it interesting that xians fear hate crimes legislation intended to protect gays. Is this an admission that what they are up to is hatred,
No, this is an admission that such use of the word “hate” plays into the abuse of the word, attaching it to anyone who morally disapproves of something. As I have written, when we so sloppily use the word hate, we mask real hate like the boy crying wolf all the time – when it is really hate, nobody listens. This was my point in Don’t agree with liberal politics? Hateful!.
I still think it’s odd that xians are so dead set against hate crimes protections being extended to include gays when they’re silent when it protects other groups. In fact, I think it’s more than odd, it’s revealing.
It is because in the gay implementation, it is always accompanied by hate SPEECH legislation, which is a severe overstep, and could easily lead to legal action against churches.
Also, since christians don't believe it is a sin to be black, they don't care if racist speech is illegal because they have no interest in preaching that (although the left calls conservatives racist for opposing things like affirmative action, or remarking on the absentee father epidemic and the victim mindset in the black community – thank God that, though liberals call such things racist, the law does not).
But xians do have an interest in preaching biblical morality, which includes condemnation of homosexuality, adultery, and promiscuity.
If tomorrow, legislation was being passed criminalizing the condemning of promiscuity as "hate speech", christians again would be up in arms because they feel that sexual purity is part of the Christian message. It's not a gay centric thing, it's that gays are pushing for such hate speech laws when other groups are not.
Do we need to repeat this?
This isn’t hate SPEECH legislation!
My view is that xians want gays back in the closet. They work incessantly against our equality under the Constitution. They have declared “cultural war” against us. And, of course, in a time of war your opponents are your enemies: you want to destroy them or, at least, dominate them. Thus, you xians are the mortal enemies of gay people. Your opposition to hate crimes legislation for gay people is just another piece of evidence supporting my view. Watch out: someday, we gays may take you at your word and take your war to you.
More from the christianist jihad front.
This isn’t hate SPEECH legislation!
I don’t know the content of the bill, but even if you are correct, there are reasons to oppose this bill – it was snuck into the defense appropriations bill rather than allowing it to stand or fall on its own merit, a federal law may be interfering with states’ rights on this issue, and in general, the general objection to hate crimes laws remains – that they are patently unjust to those who suffer crimes under other motives, not to mention that assessing actual motive may not be doable or useful. As Daren Bakst, a legal regulatory analyst for the Raleigh-based John Locke Foundation, said in the article:
They have declared “cultural war” against us.
Don’t take it personally, it’s not aimed at gays, it’s aimed at the larger cultural slide from virtue, morality, and objective truth, not to mention the anti-God atheism in society.
Your opposition to hate crimes legislation for gay people is just another piece of evidence supporting my view.
I gave my reasons, and it has little to do with gays at all, and more to do with principle – even if you successfully separate it from criminalizing speech (which the gay lobby shows little sign of caring about), you still have the problem that such laws may be unjust in general. Crimes are crimes, generally speaking, and asking for special treatment is just a way to say “if anyone commits a crime against US, we want them to be punished even more seriously.”
It’s like me pushing for laws criminalizing violence against my faith more severely than the same crimes in general, and also not caring if it extends out to people who criticize my faith. It’s partisan and causing an imbalance of justice.
Watch out: someday, we gays may take you at your word and take your war to you.
Gays may resort to violence, you never know. Murderous anger in the heart often leads to murder in reality. But when you confuse the war of ideas with a war with people, you have just sunk to the level of the jihadist.
Hi ALL:
I guess it's up to me to defend the idea of hate crime enhancements. So here I go. It is obvious that motive is relevant to determining the nature of a crime. The law recognizes that fact by distinguishing between 1 st dgree *murder* and 2nd degree *manslaughter*, even though both are killing a human being. Without motive burning a cross in the street in front of a black man is nothing but a violation of a city ordinance. There is a difference between general violence against an individual and a guy bashing in a person's head because he's gay. The latter is more than just an attack against one person, it's an attack against all the gay people in the neighborhood. The enhancement is to protect against that wider assault. There is nothing at all wrong with such, and it isn't a matter of prohibiting "thought".
your friend
Keith
I don’t think that’s motive, it’s intent. In other words, 1st degree murder is premeditated, but it does not take into account motive (money, lust, revenge).
So while we DO have different punishments based on intent v. lack of premeditation, this is NOT motive.
I don’t know the content of the bill…
An astounding admission. You criticize that which you don’t comprehend.
Don’t take it personally…
How can I not? The christianist right’s jihad has specifically targeted gays to advance its agenda. I feel personally threatened. If it’s an enemy you get, it’s an enemy you have created.
It’s like me pushing for laws criminalizing violence against my faith more severely than the same crimes in general…
These penalties already exist for the religious (hate crimes legislation again). You wish to have your cake and eat it too.
But when you confuse the war of ideas with a war with people, you have just sunk to the level of the jihadist.
This is precisely what your side has already done. The jihad is yours not ours. We only wish to live in equality and justice, and free of oppression and persecution. If we have to resort to violence, it will be just because it will be in self-defense. The evil emanates from the religious not from us.
Hi Seeker:
OK, then intent is the issue. Ther4e is a different intent when a skin head attacks a mixed race couple and when a guy attacks the guy his ex-girlfriend s dating. The latter is an attack against an individual only, the former is an attack against an entire group.
your friend
keith
An astounding admission. You criticize that which you don’t comprehend.
Wrong. I was explaining general principle on the issues of hate speech and hate crimes, and the difference because it was not clear in the original post.
If it’s an enemy you get, it’s an enemy you have created.
Actually, while Christians don’t see people as their enemies, but ideas, you may think that Christians themselves are your enemy. But actually, it’s Christian ideas – in fact, the Bible teaches that those who “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (see Romans 1 and it’s condemnation of homosexuality, among other things) HAVE ACTUALLY BECOME ENEMIES OF GOD HIMSELF.
So while you think Christians are your enemy, actually, in choosing to believe a lie you have chosen to oppose God.
We only wish to live in equality and justice, and free of oppression and persecution
You may feel that way, but by contaminating the sexual arena with perversion and unhealth, and seeking to establish it as a legal and social norm, you are threatening the health of society, and therefore threatening those who are healthy. So I guess everyone in a conflict feels threatened.
If we have to resort to violence, it will be just because it will be in self-defense. The evil emanates from the religious not from us.
Nice justification of violence. Good thing Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t think like you, nor do pro-life people, who are literally fighting for the lives of 4000 murdered per day. Perhaps in countries where gays are actually persecuted with physical violence, counter-violence might be justified, but here, I think you’re really talking out of frustration, not reason – excusing your desire to get what you want, even if by force of violence. Who’s sounding like the jihadist? I think you are mightily confused.
Oh well, no use arguing with a christianist. One might as well try to reason with an insane person or a retard.
You may feel that way, but by contaminating the sexual arena with perversion and unhealth [sic], and seeking to establish it as a legal and social norm, you are threatening the health of society, and therefore threatening those who are healthy. -seeker
“In this way, they (the rats) spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious and underground destruction – just like the Jews among human beings.”– Nazi propaganda film, “The Eternal Jew,”
seeker, your mind stinks of the same evil.
Nice one. Too bad your cries of “wolf!” (or “jihadist” or “Nazi”) are largely self-reinforcing delusions that keep you bound in your maladaptation and sin. (I say “largely” because in Islamic countries, gays are killed).
While such mean-spirited and bogus attacks on Christian morality may comfort you, they will not force the majority to throw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. they won’t discard the obvious view that hx is unnatural just because you say that all who hold such a view are Nazis. It’s like me saying that all gays are pedophiles, and thinking that’s why we should be afraid of gays – it’s fear-mongering and dishonest sophistry.
So enjoy your Nazi-hunting party – there’s one under every bush, you know.
In your case the parallels are too many and too precise to ignore.
btw: I didn’t say you are a Nazi, just that you think like one. The only self-delusions are those you practice.
From: “Gays and the Future of Anglicanism: Responses to the Windsor Report” –
From the Christian emperor Justinian in the sixth century until the eighteenth century, Christian communities around Europe regularly put homosexuals to death by burning, beheading, flaying, drowning or hanging them. The ancient Christian thinkers Tertullian, Eusebius and John Chrysostom all argued that same sex relations deserve the penalty of death…In medieval Europe, secular laws often invoked the authority of the bible to execute homosexuals. Bologna adopted the death penalty for sodomy in 1259. Padua followed suit in 1329; Venice in 1342; Rome in 1363; Cremona in 1387; Milan in 1476; and Genoa in 1556. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain actively sought out sodomites to be burned. In the hundred and twenty five years after Calvin taught in Geneva, there were thirty burnings, beheadings, drownings, and hangings of homosexuals in that city. Scores of men and boys were hanged for homosexual activity in Georgian England. Before the advent of modernity, women in Europe were also vulnerable to execution if convicted of lesbianism. The history of churches’ treatment of gay people has for over a thousand years been a history of hatred, persecution and death. To this day, standard Christian textbooks devoted to moral theology and commenting on homosexuality are usually trite treatises because of their complete silence on the long-standing brutality meted out to homosexuals by churches, whether Roman Catholic, Anglican or Protestant. For homosexuals, the history of the Christian church has been a kaleidoscope of harrowing horrors. Their fortunes have now changed. Physical violence has mutated into rhetorical violence, although there are still nine countries today where homosexual behavior is punishable by death.
In your case the parallels are too many and too precise to ignore.
Regardless of whether nazis or islamists recognize with the rest of us sane folk that homosexuality is unnatural and unhealthy, it is a typical logical fallacy (guilt by association) that all who hold such views are therefore equal to such aberrant ideologues as the Nazi’s and Islamists.
The proof is not in the similarity in moral judgments, but in the implementation of such judgments which makes all the difference.
Islamists believe stealing is wrong. You believe stealing is wrong. Why are you, then, not as bad as an Islamist? Because you don’t chop off children’s hands for stealing a morsel of food.
This is where liberal emotional reasoning fails – it abandons reason for fear-based associations, and won’t hear of any discernment beyond the surface similarities, because those surface similarities are “too numerous.”
The problem is, while this may be a good initial indicator of a potential problem, further analysis needs to be done to affirm the actual level of threat.
Try this experiment. Go to any evangelical church this Sunday and tell someone you are gay. You’d be surprised at the reaction. Then go to your local Wahabi Mosque and do the same. Think there’s no difference? I rest my case.
Your accusations are mostly crying wolf, not to mention inaccurate, pejorative, and demonizing evaluations of Christians that serve your discontent with their moral disapproval, but do not serve the purpose of truth.
We are not Nazis, nor Islamists, no matter how many surface similarities you can arrange against us.
Now, if you want a real good correlation, try comparing Islam to Nazism. See The Nazi Origins of Modern Arab Terror
As National Socialists we are not afraid to fight against this plague within our own ranks. Just as we have readopted this ancient Germanic approach to the question of marriage between alien races, so, too, in our judgment of homosexuality—a symptom of racial degeneracy, destructive to our race—we have returned to the guiding Nordic principle that degenerates should be exterminated.
Heinrich Himmler, speech, Oct. 10, 1934
Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth…
Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Or, perhaps, James Dobson or seeker?
We are not Nazis, nor Islamists, no matter how many surface similarities you can arrange against us.
But the history of xianity belies your protestations. Do you really think the inflammatory and demonizing rhetoric coming from evangelical/fundamentalist/conservative/Catholic xianity has no effect in the real world? Look at my link regarding Russian Baptists above. It was only recently that gays have gained some protection from religious persecution. These protections are as frail as civilized life. The same impulses and ideas which fueled the Nazis and today’s Islamists also fed xianity’s pogroms in the past and its activities today. You may excuse yourself from such nefarious practices, but your ideas and your rhetoric lay the groundwork for them in the future. Naming us perverts, and accusing us of polluting society and endangering families lead directly to further oppression and violence. If you can’t see that, then you are being deliberately blind to the moral and practical ramifications of your actions.
Do you really think the inflammatory and demonizing rhetoric coming from evangelical/fundamentalist/conservative/Catholic xianity has no effect in the real world? Look at my link regarding Russian Baptists above.
No, I never said that such Christian condemnations of sin have no effect. However, to correlate such effects with the murderous exterminations of Hitler (and Islam) is dishonest and misleading because you are entirely ignoring the vast difference in means of implementing change between the facscist and brutal dictators and Christianity.
You see, you associate all resistance to your agenda with fascism because, as I described in What is Hate?, you mistake moral opposition for hate, and since you perceive hate, you assume violence. It’s a cascade in your fear-based thinking that does not exist in reality. While such a cascade is a possibility, observing reality tells you something very different.
I’ll grant you that the history of Christianity has not always been kind to homosexuals, though mass extermination on the level of Hitler is not even close to reality. In fact, I would suspect it is more something like The Salem Witch Trials, in which a whole 25 people were killed (as compared to the more than 100M killed by atheistic communism and the Darwinist-influenced Nazi genocides).
And let me ask you a question. “Do you really think the inflammatory and demonizing rhetoric coming from gay apologists has no effect in the real world?” Why is it that you can demonize (by your own definition), but when others accuse you of moral terpitude, it is hate? Either allow people to morally critize others, or stop being a hypocrite and stop doing it yourself.
Look at my link regarding Russian Baptists above. It was only recently that gays have gained some protection from religious persecution.
Talk about religious persecution, how many Christians are today imprisoned or dead in atheistic Communistic countries (those bastions of reason without God)? The link you sent is horrible, but such actions are neither mainstream, nor common, nor taught in the vast majority of churches that you criticize as Hitler-like. You can not expect people to throw out the baby with the bathwater, i.e. moral disapproval of homosexuality, just because crazy people become violent with such disapprovals.
The same impulses and ideas which fueled the Nazis and today’s Islamists also fed xianity’s pogroms in the past and its activities today.
I am sorry, but that is entirely false and misleading because, while Nazism and Islam have always TAUGHT AND EMPLOYED extermination and murder as means to moral cleansing, Chrstianity has always taught the opposite – that service and preaching are the means. So what you so generally and ambiguously call ‘common impulses’ masks the fact that, while they share the moral condemnation of homosexuality, their means AND motives are entirely different. Further, though Christians often do so poorly, they are intended to be and should aim to be motivated by LOVE while proclaiming truth. Nazism and Islam make absolutely no overtures at “loving the sinner.”
Your analysis is, again, so far off because it is superficial and incomplete, ignoring critical differences that make ALL the difference. It is merely convenient, from an emotional and perhaps practical (lazy) perspective to group all of your opponents into one group. But such lies will backfire on you. Calling every person who disagrees with your moral stance akin to Hitler is really a poor strategic move, no matter how good it makes you feel to attack your adversaries with such mud slinging.
You may excuse yourself from such nefarious practices, but your ideas and your rhetoric lay the groundwork for them in the future.
Absolutely not. You are asking people to throw out the moral judgement because someone could abuse it. That is illogical. Christianity has clear principles in place to avoid such pogroms. And the alternative? To avoid condeming sin? That is what is leading our country into epidemics of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, suicide, and the breakdown of the family. Nice choice you are providing.
Naming us perverts, and accusing us of polluting society and endangering families lead directly to further oppression and violence.
A spade is a spade – perversion is perversion. Our goal is not oppression, but deliverance from deception, while you aim to perpetuate such deceptions. IMHO.
If you can’t see that, then you are being deliberately blind to the moral and practical ramifications of your actions.
If you can’t see the moral depravity of homosexuality, then perhaps it is you who is deliberately blind.
I’ll grant you that the history of Christianity has not always been kind to homosexuals…
A masterpiece of understatement.
Whatever. You aren’t worth trying to convince.
I admit that only because my main tool of evaluation is not what people do in the NAME of a religion, but what does it explicitly teach.
Immature people will always respond with fear and loathing to those who are different, esp. those who are involved in obvious unnatural affections and actions. But the correct response is not merely to accept such things as natural, but to expect maturity among those who need to respond.
BTW, it’s hard to find any real good histories documenting the alleged crimes of the church against gays. I’ve checked in these places, none of which provide any historical details. I’ll keep looking, but it seems that the worst that has been done by the Church to gays was verbal condemnation, expulsion from monastic and priestly work, and sodomy laws (which of course, I disagree with).
History of Christianity and homosexuality (wikipedia)
Religion and homosexuality (wikipedia)
Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (Wm. Percy)
Homosexual History (Spong)
Has anyone done any historical work showing Christian cruelty to gays, mass exterminations, etc.? Or are you just tired of being verbally condemned? If that’s the main approach of Christianity through the ages, I’d say you have even less of an argument than you pretend to have already.
The worst I could find was this totally undocumented claim: 1870-1970s The Dark Era. Note that this “darkest period in history,” for which the author alleges but fails to document the mass roundups, incarcerations, and killings of gays, was “NOT HISTORICALLY NORMAL.” That is, if this very modern period was the WORST in history, while it may have been bad, it doesn’t come close to the holocaust you project. Prove me wrong with real history and real numbers.
Pointless.
It is pointless if you have no data to back your claims. Social disapproval and sporadic violence against you is not a holocaust. I am starting to think that your accusations of Christian atrocities against gays is largely made up, or little more than social disapproval.
I can't find one single site that actually has historical data on this.
Who cares what you think? You're the one who dismisses the entire medical community and their professional association's conclusions on hx and, instead, goes with the agenda-driven assertions of a fringe element (usually xian-based). Evidence is meaningless to you because your entire being is devoted to your religion, which has nothing but contempt for the concept of evidence. Why bother with scientific and historical evidence when you can point to your holy book? Mein Kampf or Bible, what does it matter? The unclean evil must be expunged.
You are as cruel and heartless as your nazi predecessors.
btw: Here’s one article I encountered within moments of googling Christianity+Homophobia. Of course, you’ll dismiss this as well. Religious fanatics are just not amenable to reason or compassion of any kind.
Ohh, I didn’t use the that abuse-of-language term “homophobia.”
So, you should have praised me for finding Percy’s site and bookmarking it above. However, before I parse through this long article, can you estimate how many thousands or millions of gays were killed in history, and by whom?
No one is arguing that such atrocities occurred, or that people used the moral judgments of christianity to justify their atrocities, but were they ever really significant in number? And can you blame Christianity, or merely the pseudo-Christian political states that pursued such things?
I mean, for instance, you just can’t blame Hitler’s treatment of gays on Christianity any more than you can blame his treatment of the Jews, even if he claimed that those were his inspiration, because such murderous action is nowhere supported in the NT.
I am open to reason and compassion, and like all the evangelicals I have read or known, do not encourage violence against gays. But to ask us to throw out moral condemnation of sexual sin and emotional sickness because some use those conclusions to hate, that’s just ludicrous.
It’s like me telling you to stop criticizing Christians because some people might use that as an excuse to be violent.
The fact is, no pogrom exists, and gays who push for normalization of their orientation are harming society, and should stop it. But they won’t.
I rest my case.