Truth, Lies and In Between

…are criminal in and of themselves.

I think these laws should be repealed because they trample on the rights of those who are not in the protected classes. These laws are never applied to those protected classes and therefor should be deemed unconstitutional.

Here’s an excellent article on the matter:

“Hate” Laws are Criminal
Edward Cline

The end of freedom of speech began with the invention of “hate crimes” as a means to deter and punish crimes committed against an individual or members of a designated or protected “minority.” Hate crimes had their conspicuous genesis under the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which criminalized actions against individuals because of their race, color, gender, or national origin. This was the first major step away from treating individuals as individuals, and not as members of groups or tribes, and away from objectively defined crime.

Following it was passage of the Federal Hate Crime Law of 1969 (18 U.S.C.  § 245(B)(2)) which, among other things, clarified or buttressed the definition of resistance to law enforcement officers, including preventing individuals from voting or the like because of their race, color, gender, and so on.

It was followed by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which increased the penalties for “hate crimes.”

This in turn was complemented with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, signed into law by President Barack Obama. (Incidentally, this law was a rider to the controversial National Defense Authorization Act for 2010.) The Act’s name refers to two individuals, one a homosexual tortured to death in Wyoming, and a black man who was tied to the back of a truck in Texas and then decapitated. In neither state existed a hate crime law relevant to their groups, and the perpetrators of both crimes were tried under normal capital crime law. The formal name of the Act was a gratuitous sop to special interest groups for political advantage.

The problem with the idea of a “hate crime” is that it appends an irrelevant motive to an action that would otherwise be treated as a felony, and makes the motive a felony, as well. Further, “hate crimes” are complemented by another invalid concept, “hate speech,” also elevated to the status of a felony, that is, a crime. While criminal actions cannot be divorced from motives, up until recently motives were not punishable as state-defined and state-enforced crimes, only the fact of a criminal action. That is, a criminal action would be the initiation of force against an individual. The end or purpose of the initiation is irrelevant. It could be robbery, rape, or simply the malicious infliction of pain in revenge or as a means of visceral restitution.

This dangerous and totalitarian idea of “hate crime” has naturally migrated into the realm of speech. Now the act of expressing a “negative” stance on Muslims, homosexuals, and other “protected” groups is treated as a “hate crime” compounded by the crime of “hate speech.” Both notions seek to punish the contents of an individual’s mind. However, no matter how repellant those contents, they can never be objectively known, not even when a defendant describes them. To make the contents of one’s mind a legal liability, is a form of thought control.