What's So Bad About Hate?

1.       Questions

·         Should the law against hate crimes remain active or should they get rid of it?

·         How do you distinguish a crime between and a hate crime?

·         Why do humans hate?

2.       Response?

Should the law against hate crimes remain active or should they get rid of it?

The author, Andrew Sullivan, of “What’s So Bad about Hate” states, “For if every crime is possibly a hate crime, then it is simply another name for crime.” I agree with his statement. How does the law distinguish between a crime and a hate crime? It is based off of opinion and emotions, not facts. The jury in a court can’t get into a person’s head and tell if the crime they committed was out of hate or not. I believe this is why they should get rid of the hate crime law. A person could commit a crime and receive more time in jail because they were thought to have committed a hate crime, when it wasn’t a hate crime at all. Don’t get me wrong, there are many instances of hate crimes and I believe those are extremely cruel and uncalled for, but there is no way to distinguish the motivation of a person who committed a certain crime. The example that Andrew Sullivan gives in his article is perfect. A gay man cuts his grass regularly and his grass clippings always spilled into his straight neighbor’s driveway. Finally, the neighbor was fed up and the next time the grass clippings spilled onto his driveway, he yelled gay slurs to the man. The neighbor agreed to clean them up from the other man’s yard, but later found all of them in a box on his front porch. This led the gay man to spraying his neighbor with a hose. In return, the straight neighbor’s son came out and beat up the gay man. The police were called and the son was arrested for a hate crime. How does the law distinguish if that was a hate crime or not? They can’t. They can never know if that was driven out of anger or hate towards gay people, which is why there should not be a law for hate crimes.