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Originally Posted by Max2147
If somebody mugs me because they hate white people, I think that's worse than them mugging me because they want my money. That doesn't mean that mugging me to steal my money isn't bad. Somebody who does that deserves to be prosecuted and punished. But I'm less scared of them than the person who mugs me because they hate me for who I am.
Hatred is a lot more damaging to our society and difficult to cure than the other things that motivate crimes.
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This is the point exactly. The punishment needs to proportionally fit the damage that the crime does to the community as a whole.
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Originally Posted by August
It's just fodder for lawyers. It does nothing to deter crime or provide justice for its victims.
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Deterrence is not really the main thrust of a law. If you wanted to go down that road you could say that statutes against murder of theft don't do anything to deter murderers of thieves, so why have them?
A law expresses something that we as a people see as unacceptable due to the harm it does to our society. And when you look at the motivation for someone committing a hate crime, I bet they'd say something along the lines of they were defending their community or their identity or taking a stand against some kind of foreign unwelcome invading force. That's why we as a people need to take that away from people who would do these things and say "no, you don't speak for us and we don't condone that." And the way to do that in a legal sense is through hate crime legislation.