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Hate Crime Laws
As Orwellian Love

By Founders America
©1994
10-18-5
 
The Op/Ed Page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a column on February 11th, 1994, headlined "Hate Crimes Can Be Punished Without Suppressing Speech," by Mr. Craig Sumberg, director of the National Capital Region of the American Jewish Congress, which supports passage of Hate Crimes legislation HB 889, in Virginia.
Webster's dictionary defines "hate" as a "strong feeling of dislike for a person or thing." In effect, HB 889 is an attempt to assign extra punishment for any "bad" feelings one may hold about others, or about things which relate to others' sexual, racial, ethnic, or religious identity.
 
Because thinking naturally evokes feelings, punishing one for what one feels punishes one's thinking. This is the reason why punishing "hate" -- or thought -- is an attempt to control and suppress free speech.
 
Hate crime laws do suppress free speech.
 
If a man is given extra punishment because of his thoughts, which may or may not have been motive for his crime, then pretrial discovery must necessarily include finding "bad" speech to support that extra punishment; it involves interviewing his friends and co-workers, inspecting his library and video rental records, determining what newsletters and magazines he likes and any organizations he belongs to, in order to establish what he might have thought before and during his crime. It requires Gestapo-like searches by Thought Police.
 
The eventual result of such legislation will be prosecutors rifling the personal thoughts of any white suspect alleged to have perpetrated a crime against a minority person.
 
Moreover, to be fair, it would necessarily demand that minority suspects be investigated to uncover their "bad" thoughts about whites, whom they may have targeted for assault, rape, robbery, or murder--a far more prevalent array of "hate crimes."
 
A man may have no intention of harming another person, but because he can't predict whether a situation might arise involving an altercation with someone not of his sexual orientation or race or religion, he would be imprudent to speak openly to friends and co-workers about his politics; nor should he checkout library books or rent videos which might give clues to his thinking; nor should he join any of the many organizations which are sex-, race-, ethnic- or religion-based.
 
HB 889 is a thought-control bill, adding more punishment for what one thinks and believes. What one thinks and believes may drive one to break laws for the benefit of a perceived greater good--such as men who claim to hate abortion-clinic killings of wombed babies; hate predatory homosexuals' Man/boy clubs; or hate certain minorities' bad influence on civil society.
 
In all three instances the perceived "hate" is really political thought, which moral men might act upon. Where one man sees bigotry another sees truth. All thinking must be protected from punishment. If thinking prompts men toward unlawful conduct, then punish them for what they do -- not for their thinking -- no matter how distasteful the Thought Police find their ideas to be.
 
Thinking is the fundamental impetus for speech; ergo, "bad" thinking -- spoken or written -- must be protected.
 
If one's thoughts are linked to unlawful conduct, and if extra punishment is meted out by the State for those thoughts, then all thinking is at risk for control by Thought Police.
 
Their faulty reasoning aside, the Left's call for "love"-- which they claim motivates their Hate Crimes legislation -- is means for disarming rational thought and advancing liberals' emotion-based agenda.
 
It is really tyranny.
 
Love untempered with reason is more often destructive than constructive, as with the "love" that liberal enablers apply in keeping America's poor dependent and chained to liberals' "help."
 
With their passage of hate-crime laws, liberals undermine the Constitution and punish America with their Orwellian love.
 
-Founders' America
 

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