I was called last week by Bill O’Reilly’s staff to see if I would go on the air to defend the murderer-rapists of 13 year-old Jesse Dirkhising, or at least to defend the idea that this was just as horrific a crime as that perpetrated against Matthew Shepard. The underlying point O’Reilly wanted to make is that the liberal media hyped the Shepard murder but has all but ignored the Dirkhising rape-murder out of deference to gay sensibilities. I said I didn’t see much point in making these distinctions, and that I believed that both crimes were evil and, if convicted, Dirkhising’s assailants should get the full punishment of the law. Those kinds of nuances don’t always work well on O’Reilly so I guess I won’t be on the show. But one of the worst aspects of hate-crimes laws seems to me to be illustrated by this case. Instead of looking at crimes criminally and punishing them, hate crime laws force us to see crimes politically. They give preference to one type of crime over another, one group over another, for political reasons. And this can prompt a political response. Why should straight criminals be vilified and doubly punished while gay ones are ignored? To be sure, Dirkhising’s murder was not a ‘hate-crime’ in the way that the Shepard murder was. The gay lovers who subjected a boy they knew to a sex game that quickly became an assault were not trying to target straight boys as a group. But that doesn’t make their assault any the less heinous. Sure, the lurid details of this murder would always be great material for true gay-haters, people who want to tar all gay people with the same brush (in the same way that some activists wanted to tar all residents of Laramie with the same brush as the thugs who murdered Shepard). But without the double-standards evoked by hate crime laws, this kind of reasoning would not have much of an audience or a rationale. Yes, the true gay-haters would endure; but they wouldn’t be given the shred of a point hate crimes laws give them. And the battered bodies of Jesse Dirkhising and Matthew Shepard could finally rest in peace – along with what’s left of a fair criminal justice system.
LIFE AFTER WARTIME: More evidence of the abatement of the culture war in a piece in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. After all the huffing and puffing over partial birth abortion, it turns out that the Republicans don’t actually plan to pass anything very soon. It seems they’re stymied by a Supreme Court ruling that allows the killing of all-but-born babies, if the mother’s health is threatened. The definition of ‘health’ includes “”all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.” Why not just add: and if she damn well feels like it? Mickey Kaus has a level-headed analysis, but what strikes me is the lassitude of the Bush administration in the face of this. I guess they’re hemmed in by SCOTUS, but I would have expected something more urgent on the table by now. This is surely the real U-turn of this young administration, not carbon dioxide emissions.
The Dish 