Frank Borelli
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
I am often perplexed by situations wherein one group of people feel that it is hateful and should be illegal for another group to feel and demonstrate pride in its existence. What makes speech against one group "hateful" or illegal but speech against the other group perfectly acceptable? The difference seems to simply be that one group has been determined to be a minority.
Let's take this
hypothetical situation under consideration and see how silly this can be.
Texas is a big state and for the sake of this argument we're going to decide that it has 100 million residents.
Louisiana is a slightly smaller state and for the sake of this argument we're going to decide that it has 25 million residents.
Also for the sake of this argument we're going to create a fictional dispute between the two states over some natural resource that we'll call the green widget. Now in the course of the dispute over which state should prosper the most from the green widget another battle rages behind the scenes. It seems that the people in Texas get a little tired of having to say "people from Louisiana" all the time so they create a nickname based on the abbreviation for the state and an "S" - creating the shortened word LAs. People from Louisiana, for whatever reason, take offense to the use of the term "LAs" and sue in federal court to have any Texan who uses the term "LAs" to refer to people from Louisiana charged with a hate crime. You see, the Louisianians, or LAs, because they are so few in number compared to the Texans, are an identifiable minority and feel that the use of the shortened form of their state name is insulting, potentially degrading, and must therefore qualify as hate speech because it demeans their very existence.
Representatives from Texas fight the case citing such things as the First Amendment Right to free speech and the fact that the term "LAs" does not promote hate, endorse or induce violence, and in no way demeans people from the state of Louisiana.
The court's decision is that the term "LAs", while not illegal, is commonly used to demean a minority people and so recommends against its accepted common usage. Texans celebrate because they've retained their right of free speech and Louisianians file an appeal with a higher court citing the bigotry and prejudice of the court that ruled against them.
Some forty or fifty years later on a college campus in Texas another protocol battle is waged wherein one group of students form a campus organization to research, document and celebrate the history of the great state of Texas. A smaller group of students, being from Louisiana, file a complaint with the campus administration claiming that the existence of the Texas History & Culture Celebration Organization (THCCO) is prejudicial and the mere existence of it comprises the essence of hate group promoting hate speech against LAs. The THCCO, however, says that its membership is open to all campus students; that anyone can join; that no prejudicial rules or operative guidelines exist.
Let's stop there: what this now boils down to is that Group A disagrees with the outlook of Group B, and since Group A is comprised of people from a previously identified minority, they claim that the mere existence of Group B comprises a hate crime or promotes hate speech. I take HUGE issue with this.
Why is it illegal or hateful for the members of one historical culture to celebrate their history but not illegal for another? What makes the history and culture of one group of people any more important that the history and culture of EVERY group of people?
Now I'll ask probably the biggest question on some of your minds: Why is this on a police blog? Here's why...
Law enforcement professionals, each and every day all across this great country of ours, are called to the scene of a crime where someone claims a "hate crime" was committed. The number of such crimes used to be relatively small but since the term and qualifications for such a label grew, the number of "hate crimes" committed in America each year has grown. Depending on how you interpret the data collected that can make our country look like it's a hot bed of growing intolerance and "hate" actions. What's the reality?
Reality,
and this is just MY opinion, is probably that ALL crime is hateful. Murdering someone is pretty hateful. Raping someone is pretty hateful. It doesn't matter what race, religion, nationality, gender, age, etc of the intended victim is: crime is hateful. If we must label these crimes as different from "regular" crimes because they target a minority, then how about if we call them "minority crimes"? Or does that make too many people think that a member of a minority committed the crime? It has always bothered me that one crime is considered more serious than another crime simply because of the protected status of the victim. Robbery is robbery no matter what protected group (or not) the victim is a part of. Murder is murder the same way.
How much time and energy do we spend tracking information about the victims in an attempt to insure that crime is being committed equitably across the demographic of our country's citizenship?
What are YOUR thoughts on the matter? Please monitor your language in your response - but I look forward to reading your thoughts, comments, agreement, disagreement, etc.
Editor's Note: For those of you who may be thinking this is about race, it's actually not. The topic of this blog was spawned by a recent news story about one campus organization promoting a political outlook and another group of citizens on campus that feel the political outlook is hate-based because it alienates, by belief structure, not by treatment, their cultural heritage.
