Jessie at Pandagon is sparking some interest in the rising tide of bias-motivated crime against homosexuals, citing Florida statistics. My tangent has to do with hate crime legislation, which I have mixed feelings about for philosophical reasons.

I understand the emotional rationale behind hate crimes legislation. I was in the midst of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts when Matthew Shepherd was brutally murdered in Laramie Wyoming, the first time in my memory that the notion of "hate crime" really took the national stage.

Typical consternation over this type of legislation has to do with increasing the penalty for a crime based on its motive. That's the right-wing way to spin it, and if that's what hate crime legislation actually were -- a kind of vengence legislation based on what motivated the criminal -- it wouldn't be something to support. However, the point of increasing punishment is not to avenge a morally repugnant motive, but to additionally punish a socially malignant intent or effect.

To get a sense of this, back up off of violent crime and think about graffitti. If someone sprays up their tag on a bug stop, that's one thing. If someone sprays up some upside-down pentagrams on a church (or a swastika on a synogogue), that's something else. What is going on is not simply defacing property, it's the intimidation and harassment of an entire community of people. Now think about what that means in the context of assault or worse. Someone who beats someone else in the context of a robbery has a different impact on society compared to someone who beats someone else as a means of inflicting fear and terror on a wider group of people.

The interesting thing about this philosophical underpinning, and the source of my uncertainty, is that because this notion of social impact is relatively divorced from the social power differential involved, there's no prerequisite of minority status in the victim for the rubric to apply. Gays beating straights or blacks beating whites -- assuming the same intent/effect obtained -- would be just as much a crime. I don't know if many of my lefty comrades would go with me on that, but it seems to be the logical conclusion.

You might reclassify hate crimes as terrorism, really. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.