Richard Cohen doesn't get it....

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Tuesday August 04, 2009 · 5:54 AM PDT

2009/08/04 · 05:54

The Folly of Hate-Crime Laws

By Richard Cohen

The real purpose of hate-crime laws is to reassure politically significant groups -- blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. -- that someone cares about them and takes their fears seriously. That's nice. It does not change the fact, though, that what's being punished is thought or speech. Johns is dead no matter what von Brunn believes. The penalty for murder is severe, so it's not as if the crime is not being punished. The added "late hit" of a hate crime is without any real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or speech. Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy.

The reason that the category "hate crime" has been added to the laws of this country and many of its states is to emphasize that there is a difference between the man who gets beaten outside of a bar because he said something rude to another man's wife, and the gay man, black man, Jewish man, whatever, who gets beaten up outside of a bar because of who he is, not what he has done. The two crimes while intrinsically the same physical act are also intrinsically different in that one is motivated by another's words, deeds, or actions which is of the moment and the other because of the very nature of the individual per se. The first action is situational while the other is cultural.

The additional imposition of the status of hate crime to any other crime is not solely for the purpose of singling out another ethnic, religious, racial, or sexual group for special protection. Rather it is the acknowledgment of the need to educate and acculturate members of our society who have been socially inculcatedwith the belief that they are superior to others not of their own group and in certain instances are obligated to remind the offending "other" of their "otherness" and lack of status in this society. The designation of an act as being a "hate crime" is, if you will, a teachable moment.

And this teachable moment is necessary if we are ever to overcome the bigotry which now seems more than ever to be exploding across America.

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