Crimes du Jour

Group-think comes to the law.

Midge Decter is a writer and editor living in New York.

Many, if not most, Americans have a somewhat peculiar relation to the issue of crime. They deplore it, naturally, and grow upset and sometimes even seriously alienated at the idea that they are living in a country that seems to be positively beset with lawlessness. At the same time, they are powerfully drawn to the romance of the criminal- witness the way they reward entertainers (Francis Ford Coppola comes to mind) for such achievements as polishing the glamour of the Mafia.

And if they deplore the high rate of crime in their midst, it must be said that, for the past several decades, many of them have also been busy excusing it. Such mitigating factors as poverty, insanity, drug abuse, and the sorrows of racial discrimination have been joined by "recaptured" memories of childhood sexual abuse as grounds for demanding that both the public and the courts be more forgiving of offenders. (As an old brilliant lyric by Stephen Sondheim has it, "I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.")

Nor does the confusion end there. Youngsters who are not yet 16 may commit acts of gross violence and remain under the protection of a family court that seals their records forever, while an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania who calls three noisy black students "water buffaloes" is deemed by school authorities worthy of expulsion. (True, expulsion is not imprisonment, but in the case in question, it required just as much legal talent and passion to overcome.)

But most bewildering of all is the fact that, while the rate of crime has dropped impressively, certain very active people have been busy creating new categories of crime. Take the case of the sex crimes newly defined and publicized by the feminists. According to the definition of the felony called "date rape," if a young woman climbs naked into the bed of a young man with the intention of spending the night, on the following morning, she is entitled to cry "rape" and have the boy arrested. For though she was naked and had agreed to spend the night, he had no right to "take advantage" of her. An even more significant, because far more widespread, recently invented crime against women is that called "sexual harassment." Millions upon millions of dollars have changed hands over the declared distaste of a number of women working in corporate offices or law firms for unwanted approaches, whether physical or merely verbal. (It seems that nowadays women may complete law or business school without learning to thwart unwanted advances- something every working-class girl is taught at her mother's knee.)

But if laws criminalizing male advances to women lend a whole new enrichment to the definition of criminal behavior, what are we to say of the idea of passing laws whose intent is to criminalize thoughts and feelings? For such an idea appears to be at the top of the agenda now. Moreover, many of the very same people who once tried so hard to soften the hearts of their fellow Americans toward certain crimes on grounds of the mental or emotional state of the perpetrator seem today to be leaders of the push for special laws against what they call "hate crimes."

The term "hate crimes" does not, of course, signify what the advocates of such laws actually have in mind, for after all many kinds of crime are committed in the deepest hatred-matricide, patricide, fratricide, say. A more accurate term might be group-hate crimes, which is to say, crimes committed against total strangers because they happen to be members of a particular group.

Thus the thugs who beat to death the young homosexual Matthew Shepard in Wyoming would be found guilty of having committed a hate crime. As would someone who set fire to a synagogue or church, particularly if it were a black church. As would one Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, member of a midwestern group called World Church of the Creator, who over the weekend of July Fourth this year killed a black and a Korean and wounded nine others, six of them Orthodox Jews on their way home from synagogue. And as, of course, would Buford Furrow, who a month later turned up with an assault rifle at the Jewish Community Center in a suburb of Los Angeles, shot and wounded three little kids attending the center's day school, along with two adults who were in charge of them, and later in the day shot and killed a Filipino mailman.

In addition to provoking all the old familiar cries for gun control-as if, should guns be controlled or even totally interdicted, a Buford Furrow could not get himself a van-ful of them-the attack on the center became a perfect occasion for demanding the passage of more special laws against hate crimes. So the cry went forth, in op-ed pieces and talk shows across the land: "Give us hate-crime legislation!"

The question is, What special penalty could hate-crime legislation impose upon someone like Buford Furrow? And the answer obviously is, None whatsoever. He will be tried in a federal court (for killing a government employee) and then in a California court, and in both he will clearly be sentenced to the max.

The new campaign to seek additional legislation against hate, then, is not really meant to be directed at the cold-blooded race murderers of this world, the ones who declare themselves and feel themselves to be serving a higher cause. What more can be done either with or to them than will be done as a matter of legal course? We must therefore conclude that it is for lesser crimes that the cops and courts would be required to consider the thought rather than simply the deed.

This, make no mistake, would be a violation of the very freedom for which the United States of America stands. But set aside for a moment the question of constitutional principle-it has after all been set aside so often in recent years for the sake of social convenience-and get to the real point of the hate-crime campaign: The crimes deemed worthy of this designation will quickly come to be defined simply and only as crimes committed against members of minorities. We have certainly had enough experience in recent years to understand that. And again, at least to judge from history, first these crimes will be defined as crimes of violence committed only against members of minority groups, and as time wears on they will come to be defined as any "crime" (including critical disagreement) committed against members of minority groups, and finally the status of "minority" will be withheld from any but certain designated groups. So not only will people's thoughts be made a crime-and in what now-defunct country have we heard that one before?-the hate that is supposed to be stamped out by passing laws against it will end in all-out social war.

It is the chief glory of the United States that, in an ugly world, where groups engage regularly in bloody murder, this blessed society has found the means to keep a decent if not an always perfect civil peace. What in God's name, then, do all these good, upright, liberal advocates of hate-crime legislation imagine they are doing? Beyond, that is, giving vent to some of their ever-venturing, ever-expanding self-righteousness.

COPYRIGHT 1999 National Review, Inc.
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