Hate crime laws and the path to tyranny

October 25th, 2005
The American Thinker
Selwyn Duke

(excerpt)
The insidious thing about evolutionary tyranny is that it’s gradual progression. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the iron fist of a despot or sweep you aside with a wave of revolution, but, rather, is a death by a thousand doses of bad medicine that makes benign neglect seem utopian.

One example of this brand of tyranny is the proliferation of hate-crime laws in the Western World. The very concept of hate-crime law itself is an offense against freedom and, as such, is quintessentially un-American. Yes, I hate hate-crime laws. And so should you.

The main problem with hate-crime law is that it is an effort at thought-control masquerading as legitimate criminal-justice legislation. Let’s examine why this is so.

Consider this example: two identical illegal acts are committed; the perpetrator of one is motivated by hate, whereas the perpetrator of the other is motivated by good old greed. I’ll call the latter Mr. Greed and the former Mr. Hate. The punishment deemed appropriate for Mr. Greed is ten years in prison, but the punishment visited upon Mr. Hate is twenty years up the river because his crime was motivated by a worse impulse.

Now, let’s analyze the reason for this disparity between their sentences. Obviously, the law determined that the act itself warranted ten years in prison because that’s what was received by Mr. Greed when only the nature of the act was taken into consideration. So, this begs the question, since the two men committed the same act, what were the extra ten years imposed in Mr. Hate’s case for? They could only have been for one thing: the thoughts that motivated the act or were expressed through it.

So, now the government has been appointed both clairvoyant and arbiter of the acceptability of thoughts, bringing us one giant step closer to an Orwellian nightmare in which the state plays God, reading and judging minds and hearts and damning people based on its determinations. What’s next, “Bless me Big Brother for I have sinned; I have had proscribed thoughts”? The truth is that the government should punish actions, not motivations.

Read the rest here.