Why The Hate-crime Law Weakens Our Country
By Star Parker
November 2, 2009
President Barack Obama has signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, which included the hate-crime legislation.
Sen. Harry Reid slipped the hate-crime legislation into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have senators consider the controversial bill on its own.
It's for good reason that Democratic legislators wanted to hide under a rock while passing this terrible piece of legislation. It may help them with the far-left wing of their party. But weakening and damaging our country is not something to be proud of. And that is exactly what this new law does.
The bill adds on extra penalties to violent crimes when it is deemed they were motivated by gender, sexual orientation or disability. It's the first major expansion of hate-crime legislation originally passed in 1968, targeted then to crimes aimed at race, color, religion and national origin.
After signing this new law, Obama celebrated it by saying that in this nation we should "embrace our differences."
But law isn't about embracing our differences. It is about providing equal and nonarbitrary protection to all citizens.
Equal protection for every individual American under the law is what the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution, passed after the Civil War, guarantees. That this nation takes this guarantee seriously -- that there are no classes of individuals that are treated differently under the law -- has been a justifiable obsession of blacks.
A society in which all life is not valued the same, where murder of one citizen is not the same as murder of another citizen, is a horror which black Americans have known too well.
So it is a particular irony that this major expansion of the politicization of our law has been signed by our first black president.
What could it possibly mean that the penalty for the same act of violence -- for murder -- may be different depending on what might be deemed to be the motivation?
Can you imagine a football game where the penalty for roughing the passer is 20 yards rather than 15 if the referee concludes that the violence perpetrated was motivated because the quarterback was homosexual?
Is it not a sign of our own pathology that we now have codified that it is worse to murder a homosexual than someone who has committed adultery, even with your husband or wife, or who has slandered or robbed? Isn't the point murder?
It should be clear that hate-crime legislation has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. This should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society -- particularly to those, such as blacks, who have been so victimized by politicization of law.
The social breakdown that produces the disproportionate violence in black America is the product of the same moral relativism and politicization of law that has produced hate-crime bills.
We already have a source that instructs against murder and to love your neighbor as yourself. But this has been banned from our schools and our public spaces. So once again, in what is becoming our godless nation, we mistake the disease for the cure.
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Star Parker is president of the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education. Her e-mail address is parker@urbancure.org.
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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
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