Not all crimes are hate crimes

Not all crimes are hate crimes

Aug 18, 2001

The concept of "hate crimes" is confusing and even threatening to many people. That has become apparent in the wake of the murder of Fred Martinez Jr., an openly gay Cortez teen.

Martinez’s death has been labeled a probable hate crime because the man accused of his murder, 18-year-old Shaun Murphy, allegedly bragged to a friend that he had beaten up a homosexual.

Since then, there has been a lot of criticism of the idea of hate crimes as a separate category of offense. At a recent community forum, our state representative, Mark Larson, talked about the need for broadening Colorado’s existing ethnic-intimidation law, which addresses attacks motivated by someone’s race, color, ancestry, religion or national origin. Larson would make it a hate crime also to target someone because of his or her age, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Several audience members questioned the idea of such legislation, saying it gives "special rights" to certain people. And some recent letters to the editor in our newspaper have repeated the oft-heard adage that "all crimes are hate crimes."

That mantra is superficially appealing, but dangerously simplistic. The distinction between hate crimes and other offenses is real, not imaginary, and so is the need to pay particular attention to the former.

It’s true that the term "hate crimes" is something of a misnomer. Any act of willful destruction, any attack on another human being, may seem an essentially hateful act, but not all assaults, murders, or works of vandalism are hate crimes. A contract killing, no matter how brutal, is an essentially hate-less act. A husband’s assault on a cheating wife may be motivated by a powerful mixture of violent emotions, including hatred, but that isn’t legally a hate crime, either.

A hate crime is prompted not by jealousy or greed, but by bias and prejudice against a particular type of person. Clearly, not all illegal acts fall into that category.

And while it may seem, at first thought, that an assault is an assault and a crime is a crime – regardless of who is the target – hate crimes truly merit special penalties.

If someone scrawls gang symbols or childish pornography over your garage door, that’s an act of vandalism that deserves to be punished. But if someone writes Die, Jew! across your picket fence, it’s a far worse act and should be treated as such.

If a heedless slob dumps trash out of his car onto your lawn, it’s one thing. If he puts a burning cross in your front yard, it’s another thing entirely. Why? Because the latter act is not just a crime against one individual, but an attempt to intimidate and harass a whole category of people. It can easily inspire similar attacks by similarly prejudiced persons and create a climate of fear for blacks, Native Americans, Mormons, or gays – whatever group might be its target.

Mark Larson is a Republican and hardly a dewy-eyed liberal, but he clearly sees the need to strengthen our state’s existing laws against what he prefers to call "bias-motivated crimes." The legislation he proposes would not just broaden the classifications of such crimes, but would provide for restorative justice and education of persons convicted of them.

Such laws do not grant special privileges to anybody. On the contrary, they protect us all. If a white person living in a Hispanic neighborhood becomes the target of racially motivated attacks, that would be a hate crime just as surely as it would in the reverse case.

Call them what you will – hate crimes, bias-motivated crimes, crimes of unreasoning prejudice against fellow human beings who happen to be a little different. Hate crimes are real, they are serious, and they need to be recognized. Mark Larson understands this, and he deserves to be commended for taking steps in that direction.