Our View - Saturday

HATE CRIMES & HATE GROUPS
Spreading myths, lies, and smear campaigns

The only thing we have to hate, is hatred itself. And what's worse than hate? A hate crime, of course, or a hate group. Apparently, Colorado has plenty of both. The Denver Post reports that hate crimes are on the rise, and with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center it lists 12 "hate groups" we should watch out for.

But should we really be alarmed? Probably not.

A hate crime is merely a regular old crime in which the suspect may have hated the victim or a particular class of individuals represented by the victim. The crime itself is generally far worse than the hatred. That's because hatred that goes unexpressed, or is never acted upon, remains relatively silent and harmless. It's nothing other than a thought, or a feeling, wreaking havoc the person who hates. When it becomes an assault, then it's a problem. Not the hatred, per se, but the assault.

Somehow the hateful feelings of some criminals have become important enough, however, that the severity of a crime may be enhanced if the criminal felt hatred while conducting the unlawful act. Hatred has become such a concern that government has gone to work keeping statistics on feelings of hatred. The Post reports that "hate crimes" climbed close to an all-time high in 2006, the most recent year for which the Colorado Bureau of Investigation has published hate-crimes statistics. The bureau reported 136 incidents of hate crimes in 2006, while there were only 122 in 2005. The hate crimes, says the Post, involve victims who are minorities, religious or of a "different sexual orientation." If the sexual orientation of the criminal and victim must be different, that means a heterosexual cannot commit a hate crime against another heterosexual. The heterosexual criminal may lash out against the first heterosexual he sees, causing the victim harm, but that's just a regular crime. Don't call it a hate crime, because in the minds of bureaucrats and politicians only a certain kind of person in, in a specific circumstance, can hate or be hated in a criminal way.

The story about elevated hatred included a list of Colorado hate groups, as identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center - a thoroughly discredited organization that labels organizations with opposing political philosophies as hate mongers.

The new Colorado list includes the Colorado Springs-based Family Research Institute. The conservative fundamentalist organization is headed by Paul Cameron, a psychologist and reviewer for the British Medical Journal, Psychological Reports and the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association. The organization's mission is "to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse."

There's no question about it: The Family Research Institute opposes homosexuality, and goes out of its way to discourage and besmirch it. It's controversial, ideological, politically incorrect and unpopular. But is it a hate group, like the Ku Klux Klan or a Nazi skinhead club? Far from it.

The same list includes Rescues Without Borders, a Boulderbased organization. The group takes a radical, unwavering stand against illegal immigration. Our View considers the organization's cause extreme, wrong-headed, and somewhat ignorant. But Rescues Without Borders isn't a hate group. It's an organization with a controversial stand on a pressing public policy issue of our time, illegal immigration. The organization opposes policy, not race.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a history of libeling organizations it doesn't like. It once maligned a Colorado gun store on a list of anti Semites. The merchant was a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors. It labeled a conservative Colorado radio station as anti-Semitic, when it's banner talk show host was a devoutly Jewish police psychologist devoted to holocaust education.

Hatred is ugly, and something most Americans resist. Uglier, however, are overt efforts to politicize hatred, lie about it, and exploit it for political gain.

ASSESSING MILITARY LIMITS

When President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff last month it was in a secure Pentagon room known as "the tank," so it is almost impossible to know what happened for sure. But enough came out to suggest the military leaders were exceedingly frank with the president about the toll the Iraq war is taking on our military.

The public version is that the Joint Chiefs agreed with the president and Iraqi commander Gen. David Petraeus that there should be a "pause" when the current withdrawal of the extra 30,000 troops constituting the "surge" is completed in July. It seems likely, however, that the agreement that senior commanders in Iraq will make more frequent assessments of security conditions on the ground than the current schedule of every six months arose at the insistence of the Joint Chiefs and was aimed at increasing pressure for more-rapid troop reductions.

It is significant that this particular pressure to reduce the number of troops in Iraq and to reduce the deployment time from 15 months to 12 months is not coming from professional peaceniks or Democratic candidates, but from professional warriors.

Over the long haul, once the war in Iraq winds down, it is important to have a wide-ranging national discussion on U.S. policy in the future, which not only considers the option of being more prudent about possible future conflicts, but reconsidering the idea that trouble and instability in the rest of the world automatically require a U.S. response. For the near future, the Joint Chiefs' concerns should be paramount, especially given that things have taken a turn for the worse in Afghanistan, near where actual central al-Qaida leaders are located, and additional U.S. troops there soon might be a priority.