Star Parker: A hateful hate-crime law
By: Star Parker
Examiner Columnist
November 2, 2009
President Obama has signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Actually, he signed into law the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act tacked onto what was the hate crimes legislation.
Sen. Harry Reid, our brave Democratic majority leader, slipped the hate crimes bill into the defense authorization bill to avoid having to have our senators consider the controversial hate crimes bill on its own.
It’s for good reason that our 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 hate crime law does.
The bill adds extra penalties to punishment of violent crimes when it is deemed they were motivated by gender, sexual orientation or disabilities. It’s the first major expansion of hate crimes 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 non-arbitrary protection to all citizens.
Equal protection for every individual American under the law is what the 14th 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 that 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?
Can we really believe that someone capable of murder is less likely to do so if the victim is a homosexual and the penalties are greater than for the other reasons above?
It should be clear that hate crime law has nothing to do with improving our law but rather with creating favored political classes. Something that should be hateful to everyone who cares about a free society. And particularly hateful to those, such as blacks, who have been so victimized by politicization of law.
How about the sad and pathetic recent murder of a 16-year-old Christian black honor student in Chicago by four teenage thugs, also black? A hate crime?
Black-on-black homicides that are tearing up our inner cities? Hate crimes?
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.
Examiner Columnist Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (urbancure.org).
She is syndicated nationally by Scripps Howard News Service.
Follow The Examiner
