Will they cover mild distaste?
Well it’s kind of futile (as well as intrusive and dictatorial and so on) to pass laws against hatred. How would you enforce them? How would you know when they’d been broken?
Ireland’s prime minister pledged to modernise laws against hatred in the coming weeks after 34 people were arrested for rioting in Dublin on Thursday night.
Modern or medieval, they’re still futile.
“We will pass new laws in the coming weeks to enable the Gardai (police) to make better use of the CCTV evidence they collected yesterday, and also we will modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general,” Varadkar told a news conference on Friday.
Incitement is one thing and hatred is another.
There are other things we can do about hatred, after all. We can attempt to persuade against it. We can make arguments. We can talk about consequences. We can lecture, scold, preach, satirize, whine, mock – we can tell stories, paint pictures, write books, make arguments.
But force isn’t going to work, because there’s no solid surface we can find and then push.
Beautifully said. I wish more people could understand this.
I think this distinction comes to bear also when activists push for “acceptance” rather than standing simply against discrimination and mistreatment. If someone thinks gay people or atheists or whatever are an abomination and are going to hell, but are nonetheless entitled to the same pay and accommodations and treatment as anyone else, I think that’s as much as we could reasonably ask.
“Incitement to hatred” is a strange turn of phrase. Sounds very Mean Girls. “Britney, Becky with the good hair totally dissed you at lunch!”
Generally, US Hate Crime laws work very well, to the extent that they’re applied as written. It can be easily understood that, for instance, vandalism is one thing (a nuisance property crime), but a swastika on the side of a Jewish cultural center is another (an active threat, meant to cause fear to a segment of the community). Similarly, a violent attack to gain the victim’s wallet, and an equally violent attack against a person solely because of his skin color are different beasts–again, the latter is deliberately meant to terrorize not only the victim, but also any others sharing his skin color in that neighborhood. More victims = bigger crime. (Elliot Rodger was a clear-cut example of a hate crime against women, as another example. He wasn’t shooting just to express social frustration, but to actively create a fear-response in women who say no to sex with men.)
So in the US, hate crime laws seek to regard bias as a modifier to the punishment criteria of an actual crime. No actual crime, no ‘hate crime’.
There’s two main issues that come up.
First off, women are notoriously under-represented in hate-crime legislation, and even in places where the law does recognize them as a protected class, prosecutors are unwilling to pursue crimes against women-for-being-women as hate crimes. There are plenty of cases of rape, in particular, where the perpetrator is clearly acting out of not merely a desire to sexually dominate a single woman, but rather to ‘put women in their place’. Serial rapists should almost always get hate-crime kickers, for instance.
The second issue (again, in the US) isn’t so much with law, as with law-like codes (such as university policies) that seek to treat the opinion and the deed as not merely morally/ethically equivalent, but also as ‘legally’ equivalent. This is vastly more shaky ground, and prone to both abuse (targeting someone whose speech isn’t anywhere near actual attempts to provoke violence) and lopsided approaches (look at social media policies that punish anti-trans-idology speech with rabid fervor, but look the other way at straight-up rape threats against women).
Germany has a historical/cultural reason for wanting to keep the lid on speech, and other European nations often seem to want to follow suit. But it’s still a huge risk to civil liberties to cross that line.
But Reuters didn’t say “laws against hate crimes”; it said “laws against hatred.” Reuters seems to have taken its cue from Varadkar himself:
Laws against hatred in general?
Good luck with that.
[…] a comment by Freemage on Will they cover mild […]
Of course, it doesn’t help that anything other than unthinking agreement with tons of highly dubious truth claims, academic “theories” (based on alternative, non-scientific, “ways of knowing”), ideological doctrines etc. is increasingly taken to imply “hate”, “phobias”, the denial of unspecified “rights”, rhetorical or epistemic “violence” etc. So even if you don’t actually harbor any hostile feelings towards the group in question – not even of the “mild distaste” kind – disagreement with some obscure piece of postmodern doctrine can be enough to get you convicted. Again it’s very much like the way words and phrases like “worker’s rights”, “egalitarianism”, “anti-imperialism”, “anti-fascism” etc. in the Soviet Union or Mao’s China turned into little more than synonyms for the wholesale embrace of autocracy, the one party state, leader worship, forced orthodoxy and intellectual conformity, thought police, endless purges and show trials, political arrests, torture, executions, forced collectivization, mass-starvation, genocide etc. etc.