Hate Laws within the web of Man's Laws

Hate Laws within the web of Man’s Laws

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Their names have been repeated. They were Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha. So far officials are describing the murders as related to a parking dispute. It is probably the first time people were murdered in their own home, each being shot in the head, over a parking dispute. The following photograph has been viewed around the world showing the three victims.

Deah Barakat, wife Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha

            Despite being young, the three were known for their works of charity and their desire to use their education to help those in need. A moving tribute was expressed in this article by a friend of Yusor Abu-Salha.

            A couple of days after their murders I saw someone post their opinion that hate laws were unneeded and only added confusion to the legal system. The writer pointed out that murder is by definition a hate law. I am not writing to condemn the person who posted the perspective, for I would have expressed the same Conservative perspective a couple of years ago. I want simply to give some food for thought about hate crimes and how the classification seems to me an important classification for our American legal context.

            There is an idea that legal systems should be simple. Perhaps they should be simple. But the reality is that legal systems are made complex because the purity of perfection has been exchanged for the complexity of sin. Consider the Old Testament, which is viewed by most of my Conservative Christian friends as part of God’s Word. Yet Jesus acknowledged a complexity about the Law of God if we were to properly understand and seek justice. Some religious leaders asked Jesus what he thought about divorce. He told the leaders that simply because the Old Testament provided for divorce did not mean that God gave his approval of divorce. It was added because of the hardness of men’s hearts. Evidently divorce is symptomatic of something not right, but because of human hardness sometimes a divorce is better to allow a person an opportunity to live a full life than forcing someone to be confined in an abusive relationship where one member of the marriage may be unfaithful to their pledge in connection to their marital union. The reason for the complexity of the added on provision which muddied the waters defining God’s will was the hardness of our sinful hearts. Legal complexity has its source in human sin.

            Conservatives often oppose hate crime legislation based on the subjective nature of hate crime legislation. But the reality is that all law, including Biblical law has a component of evaluating circumstances, motives, and states of mind as can be deduced beyond a reasonable doubt. In the Old Testament there were guidelines issued differentiating between manslaughter and murder. In our legal system we have followed that example to distinguish an act of malice from a sudden explosion of temper from a purely accidental act which led to someone’s death. There are different degrees of culpability. The search for justice requires us to seek to determine motive as much as that is possible.

            There are times when additional laws are created to speak to a particular abuse of law in accord with the tendencies of a particular culture. I believe we find that sort of law being enacted in the Book of Esther. Haman, the bad guy in the Purim story has gotten an edict made into law that slipped by the king because it was ostensibly made to honor the king; and by honoring the king to honor the great nation of Persia. But Haman’s intent covered his hate for Mordecai, a Jew. His hate for the Jews who would not show the sort of honor he was demanding because of the demands of their faith made the law as a way to attack Jews. Esther, therefore willingly broke protocol at the King’s court in order to speak of the plot against her people. The Persian custom did not allow the king to repeal a law he had created. He had created it under Haman’s advice. He did the next best thing. He made a law saying that the Jews could defend themselves against anyone trying to enforce the previous law against them. The tide turned and the Jews won a great victory over their enemies. The edict inspired by Esther’s brave intervention, in essence sought to correct a wrong that had entered the Persian practice of law enforcement.

From 2006 movie “One Night with the King”

            It is clear that America’s “hate crime laws” have been legislated to address well-known failures in America’s law enforcement history. There has been a repeated problem with minority treatment in America. No modern American history would attempt to wash away the historical failures of our growing nation’s tendency to mistreat and take advantage of the Native American population during our era of westward expansion. American slavery can only be treated as almost universally a race based disenfranchisement and enslavement of a people of color different from the privileged white European community in the United States. Hate laws have been enacted precisely because our history is full of examples where minorities were harassed, abused, and mistreated in a variety of ways in which the minority group was treated as less than equal with the dominant race, ethnicity, or faith.

            We do not have hate crime legislation in order to add confusion to our American legal system. We have hate crime legislation because treating people as less than equal on the basis of race, color, creed, ethnicity, and faith has for a long time added to the confusion between American ideals and American reality. As a culture and as a society we have seen the need to highlight the problem of bias and hate in our culture with hate crime legislation. Perhaps there has been headway made, but there are reminders that perhaps we haven’t yet finished the course of a society where such hate crimes are no more a problem.

            It is ironic that Yusor Abu-Salha, as an American daughter of immigrants loved how in the United States there were people of many faiths and ethnicities living together within one culture. She speaks joyfully of this American reality in this podcast a few months before her death.

There is a temptation in dealing with laws to believe that justice is always served best by simplifying our legal system. I believe that hate crime legislation can likely be abused, but I also believe it stands out as a highlight against activities we need in our nation to be standing against. I suspect that the message from the following classic one-minute movie clip  taken from the movie “A Man for all Seasons” serves us well in this discussion. I choose the clip because one wonders if we strip the law of all its excess edicts will there be any edicts to hide us from the storm that will then turn on us?