'Are You Muslim?' Hate Crime

[Elephant Walk]

Originally Posted by KSig RC

So . . . huh? The analogy just fails everywhere - there's no 'social control' aspect to killing your wife's lover. There is a strong precedent for the law to protect the minority from the majority - hate crime laws make tons of sense from that standpoint, and seem very American (in a variety of good and bad senses).

You can't prove that there isn't "social control" in that analogy. Maybe that was the guys intent. His intent was to terrorize anyone that cheats. You don't know, and the law won't know.

Furthermore, someone who kills a person and says specifically "I hate this specific race" may have no intent on social control, but simply killed the person. Even if the most obvious "hate crime" is given, there's likely no proof there's "social control" unless he says "I plan to terrorize all persons of XYZ ethnicity". And then, I agree...some form of exacerbated punishment needs to be doled out. But I'm not sure that happens much.

Let's put this one out there:
If the precedent for the law was to protect the majority from the minority, then clearly if a black person kills a white person, and says expressly that he hates white people... he should only get simple murder. Or does it apply to all? And then, what necessity is the precedence if it applies to all?

Luckily, the law does it for us, so we don't have to rely on specious interpretations of "minority" that lead to things like "we're all minorities."

I'm not sure it's a "specious interpretation", it's the interpretation of a definition of minority.