Last February a 15 year old boy (Larry King) was murdered by a 14 year old classmate in broad daylight while at school because he was gay. I think this is one of the clearest, most excruciating examples of what exactly a hate crime is.
It is always a tragedy to lose someone so young to a horrible act of violence, yet that is only part of the evil effect of Larry's murder. The nationwide news that someone, especially a young student, was murdered simply because he was gay absolutely chilled me. Growing up gay is hard, even (perhaps especially) for those in the closet. Many young glbt students feel forced to stay silent, preferring not to seek guidance and go it alone for fear of being found out, ridiculed, or rejected. As a result glbt teens have dramatically higher rates of attempted and committed suicide, drug use, and drop outs.
I’m not one to get too emotionally involved in news stories, but when I first heard about Larry I just broke down and wept for a while. Not just for him, but for the thousands upon thousands of young, struggling glbt youth who I knew felt the proverbial closet door slammed in their faces and would surely resign themselves to more of the closet’s inherent hardship and loneliness as their already significant fears were augmented by this legitimization of the fear that someone may go so far as to kill them if they tried to be who they really are.
It is this pervasive fear and debilitating effect on communities and populations that marks the way in which bias-motivated crimes must be understood. The crime itself is an offense against an individual, and the fear and psychological effects that hurt significant portions of the population or a community are a second crime which must be addressed.
Hate crimes legislation doesn’t value some peoples lives over others, and it doesn’t limit anyone’s freedom of speech or right to dissent, it acknowledges that when one member (or perceived member) of a community of people is criminally attacked solely because of that association, it is intrinsically and inseparably an attack on that community.
I don’t know if the Matthew Shepard Act will prevent any of these hate crimes from being committed (I always figured that if something carrying a criminal punishment in the first place isn’t enough of a deterrent I don’t know what is) but the inclusion of crimes based on GLBT status and the expansion of the federal government’s ability to track and prosecute these hate crimes is extraordinarily significant by itself.
A young woman who ran the GLBT group I was president of at Kent State a few years before me was ambushed one night while she walked across campus and then brutally beaten while explicit anti-gay slurs were shouted at her. GLBT organizations are still furious at the university and city officials because they refused to classify it as a hate crime and subsequently released an obviously deceptive report on hate crimes that didn’t include the attack on this young woman. Had the Matthew Shepard Act been in place 5 years ago this attack would have undeniably been classified as a hate crime, and even if local municipal and university officials would still have refused to pull their heads from the sand GLBT students on that campus (many of whom still struggle to recover completely from the terror caused by that attack) would have had somewhere to turn instead of essentially being told to “get over it “ and do it silently.
Vulnerable people and communities must be valued and protected.
Do you happen to know if the person who beat up that woman was arrested, charged and convicted?
ReplyDeleteIf I really had no idea whether amending the penal code in this way would have a deterrent effect - and you seem to be skeptical of that idea in this post - I'd be very reluctant to do so.
ReplyDeleteSRNR-I asked an old friend from Kent about that and no, the assailants (it was a couple of guys) were never found, which made it a particularly frightening attack.
ReplyDelete^Part of the reason was that she wasn't able to give a good description of the people attacking her. They thought she was a gay boy, and so while she was being attacked she dropped to the ground and covered her face fearing they might do something worse if they knew she was a girl.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous- That is an absolutely proposterous position. There are more and better reasons to criminalize something than provide a deterrent (reflecting values and establishing the right to apprehend and prosecute those who commit offenses come immediately to mind), and there are almost always better ways of dettering things than criminalizing them.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that things are illegal is hardly ever a significant deterrent. Consider the fact that we are pretty much the only major western nation that still uses the death penalty, yet still we have a tremendous per capita rate of homicides. The logic of your argument would use this as reason not to criminalize murder.
This is ridiculous, do you really think that a crime has a more negitive effect on society because of the modivation? Some gay person is attack and that person and their friends or family feel more pain than a heterosexual. Thats ridicoulus.
ReplyDeleteI'm gay, and I have never felt like a victim. And I'm so fucking tired of liberals and democrats telling me I am. Sure we need to fix things in the criminal justice system, but passing laws which value some victims over others is downright evil. And since you admit hatecrimes don't prevent hate crimes, valuing some victims over others is all this really is. Typical Democrat pandering to minority groups. Disgusting