A 31-year old woman, Erica Menendez of the Bronx in the United States, will be charged with second-degree murder a in connection with the death of a Muslim man who was pushed onto the tracks of a Queens subway station and crushed by an oncoming train. According to the New York Times article, Ms. Menendez pushed the man onto the tracks because of the September 11th terrorist. A question that has shown up recently on the Muslim Academy website and the comments is: what exactly is a hate crime? I would like to take the question one step further and ask: Are hate crimes meaningless?
The United States has had a long and checkered past when it comes to civil rights. From the beginnings of the native American genocide, through Slavery and anti-Chinese exclusion acts, through Japanese internment camps and the civil rights struggles of the 1960′s, America has had to come to grips with her reality as a melting pot of different cultures and religions. The result hasn’t always been pretty, with crimes committed against different races, genders, and religions. In order to protect special classes of people, various states and the Federal Government have enacted hate crime legislation.
Hate crime legislation makes it a federal offense to commit an act against a protected group out of hate. That is to say, burning a church down because you are crazy is a normal crime, but burning a church down because you hate Christians is a ‘hate crime’. Killing a Muslim man in the course of a robbery is a normal crime, but what Ms. Menendez did, by killing him because he is Muslim, raises the bar to a hate crime, with additional penalties that come with the fact that it is, in fact, a hate crime.
It is my humble opinion that hate crime legislation is useless and should be abandoned. It is not our place to legislate hate. A crime is a crime. If you kill someone because you don’t like his outfit, is that somehow ok? But killing him because of reasons that society has deemed inappropriate raises the bar so that you should receive extra punishment? If Ms. Menendez had pushed the man onto a train because she thought it was funny, she should receive less punishment? No. A woman who pushes a man in front of a train for fun or spite should be given the exact same punishment as a woman who pushes a man in front of a train because he is Muslim.
Hate crime legislation is nothing more than an attempt by legislators to let the populace know that they are trying to do something about crimes like this. But the legislation is a mere facade, an illusion with no real substance. You can’t change people and you can’t punish people for hating. You can punish acts but you shouldn’t punish a person any differently because you want to placate a certain subset of society. We live in a new world where America says all people are created equal. Well then American should really treat people equally, and not judge whether one type of murder is better than another.
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