Ramesh Ponnuru is concerned that Orrin Hatch is going to produce a new and tough-as-nails hate crimes statute to appease the Congressional Black Caucus. Ramesh is right to be dismayed. The idiot-right actually believes that the way to win over minorities is not to rid itself of prejudice and promote good conservative principles for all Americans. It believes that you have to adopt left-liberal panaceas to brandish as innoculation against the charge of bigotry. This was Lott’s farewell gambit. Now it’s Hatch’s. But this particular ploy won’t even achieve the results Hatch wants. Why? Because Hatch’s proposal will go out of its way to exclude gays from federal hate crimes protection. Here’s a simple question to those conservatives who support hate-crime laws for blacks but not for gays. (That includes the president.) What’s your rationale? Let’s say you’re an orthodox fundamentalist who believes that gay sex is immoral. I don’t agree with you (gay sex can be moral and immoral, like all sex), but let’s concede that this can be a sincere moral position. How do you get from that to saying that gays – uniquely – should be excluded from protection from hate crimes? Isn’t your official position that you hate the sin, not the sinner? Isn’t it wrong – on Christian grounds – to say that somehow violence against one group is less worrisome than against another? Isn’t it a violation of Biblical principles to condone any bigotry accompanied by violence – bigotry not based on a position on a sexual act but on a person’s simple identity? Gays, after all, are one of the social groups most vulnerable to hate-filled physical attacks in our society. By saying that every other group deserves protection, except this one, is, to my mind, prima facie evidence of anti-gay animus. Again, this has nothing to do with the morality of gay sex. The average thug doesn’t walk down the street, see a lonely homo and think, “I need to reassert the importance of procreation as essential to an ordered society.” He thinks: “Fucking faggot. Let’s kick some pansy-ass.” Hatch wants to say that someone motivated in this fashion is somehow less reprehensible than someone who wants to attack someone because he’s Jewish or black or white. I want to say: is Hatch kidding? How low does he think gay people are in the social order that it’s okay to send a signal that demonizing and loathing them is somehow less problematic than demonizing and loathing other groups?
PRINCIPLES, INDEED: It seems to me there are two defensible positions on hate crimes laws. One is that they are all pernicious, illiberal, incoherent and should be abolished (that would be mine). The other is that they have merit and should protect any minority from being physically attacked. (A third is to oppose them all in principle, but if they’re are practically unavoidable, to make sure they are fairly applied. That’s my default position.) The one stance that makes no sense – a stance that can only be explained by pure prejudice – is that some beleaguered groups deserve protection but that others – gays – somehow don’t. Hatch’s proposal – and president Bush’s current position – is therefore text-book prejudice. You can’t be a compassionate conservative and send a public message that you think gay-bashing is not as big a deal as black-bashing or Jew-bashing. Or you can – and show yourself to be barely indistinguishable from a man, Trent Lott, you just spent a great deal of effort condemning.
The Dish 