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Expanding Hate Crimes Lowell Ponte President George W. Bush and the Republican Party have shown once again that they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The Democratic Party used its new House majority to pass expanded Federal "hate crime" legislation that would extend special protections in new ways to women and homosexuals. President Bush responded last Thursday by saying that state and local laws already afford such special protections and by threatening a veto. (Unmentioned: such federal law would subject those found not guilty in state or local trials to the de facto double jeopardy of ideologically-motivated federal show trials.) Mr. Bush should have responded in a far bolder, more imaginative way. The shopworn arguments concerning hate crime laws are familiar. Supporters assert that when someone is attacked for being black or gay or Muslim, this threatens and frightens everybody in the victim's group. Such a hate-motivated act thus assaults many people, not just one, and should be punished more severely than a crime against one victim. Hate crimes are really "thought crimes," say opponents. Such laws punish people for what they think and say. This violates and stifles First Amendment freedoms of speech and belief. Such laws are never enforced equally, say critics. In practice, these laws are mostly used to punish white heterosexual males, not African-Americans who attack whites or gays who attack straights. Story Continues Below
Hate crime laws make perfect sense for Democrats, whose liberal ideology is collectivist and sees people as members of groups, not as individuals. The Democratic Party is little more than a collection of such groups, each seeking to advance its own selfish interests over the nation's common good. Those groups whose members tend to vote Democratic are — surprise, surprise — the same groups favored by Democrat-authored hate crime legislation. In feudal Europe, a peasant who attacked an aristocrat was punished far more severely than was an aristocrat who attacked a peasant. Aristocrats lived under laws, rights and privileges different from those that applied to peasants. President Bill Clinton, of the neo-feudal Democratic Party, tried to restore this medieval inequality with a measure to heap extra punishment on anyone who attacked a past or present government employee. In George Orwell's dystopian novel "Animal Farm," all the animals were officially equal but some animals were "more equal than others." The ruling pig elite had power and privilege far above others. So, too, in Bill Clinton's big government-advocating party, those whom the government employs or whose votes empower the Democratic Party are to have rights and protections greater than yours or mine. (President Clinton and his Vice President Al Gore even altered the 2000 Census to count citizens of mixed parentage as belonging to the group "of the non-white parent." This was intended to boost the numbers of, and government benefits for, politically favored groups. But it restored to the Census a standard used a century earlier when segregationist lawmakers defined as black anyone with "even one drop" of African-American blood.) It should surprise nobody that Adolf Hitler was both a socialist, like today's liberal Democrats, and a racist. Socialism and racism are remarkably parallel and compatible collectivist ideologies. And it should surprise nobody that in America the political party of the slave owners, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and Bull Connor — the Democratic Party — continues to use racial polarization as it always has to gain and maintain its power. But the Republican Party of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. The Republican Party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan advocated rugged individualism, not the collectivist idea that we should think of ourselves only as members of racial, ethnic and other groups. I wish, as I first argued 10 years ago in a Wall Street Journal column, that Republicans would take a fresh approach to counter Democratic Party expansions of hate crime laws. "I'll be happy to agree to new hate crimes protections for women and homosexuals," President Bush should tell the press. "But since the goals of such laws include identifying, punishing, and abolishing hate itself, I shall support proposed Democratic changes to our hate crimes laws only if they agree to include in the laws another widely-practiced form of hate. "I refer, of course, to class hatred," President Bush ought to tell reporters. "Every day people are assaulted and robbed merely because they are poor — or rich. Every day, for example, we hear hate mongers demeaning a small minority among us and calling for unequal taxes to expropriate what they have earned — merely because this hard-working minority is rich. Such hate speech sows seeds of violence. "I call on the Democratic Party to make illegal one of the most widely practiced forms of hatred in America today — class hatred," President Bush should announce. Will President Bush do this? Not on your life. The liberal media would instantly declare that he was seeking a privileged status for the wealthy people the Republican Party serves. (It will go unmentioned that the Democratic Party's candidates rely far more heavily on millionaire and billionaire fat-cat donations than do Republican candidates.) Would Democrats include class hatred in their hate crimes legislation? Not a chance. Class warfare and envy of the rich are the bread and butter of Democratic political demagoguery. If preaching hatred for the wealthy and advocating "soaking the rich" with ever-higher taxes were stigmatized in the hate crimes laws alongside racism, sexism and homophobia, the Democratic Party would wither and die overnight. This, of course, is precisely why President Bush and the Republicans should raise certain questions. Why are Democrats eager to criminalize some kinds of hate but refuse to outlaw others? Are Democrats genuinely opposed to hatred — or are they merely using hate crimes laws to confer superior legal status on their constituency groups while Democratic politicians continue to preach hatred against prosperous Republican supporters? Perhaps some local or state government could add class hatred to its existing hate crime law to demonstrate the arbitrary, unequal and unconstitutional nature of punishing freedom of thought, speech and opinion.
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