WaPo columnist Richard Cohen slams hate crimes laws
Richard Cohen, the iconoclastic Washington Post columnist, has now taken on a top priority of several major Jewish groups, including the ADL, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
New hate crimes laws like the one all three groups say is a top priority in the current Congress are just a “sop for politically influential interest groups — yet another area in which liberals, traditionally sensitive to civil liberties issues, have chosen to mollify an entire population at the expense of the individual and endorse discredited reasoning about deterrence,” Cohen writes.
He essentially agrees with evangelical leaders who insist hate crimes laws punish thought and speech, and cites the case of James von Brunn, who allegedly killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum a few months ago, as proof.
Von Brunn already faces a murder charge that could result in the death penalty; “the added ‘late hit’ of a hate crime is without any real consequence, except as a precedent for the punishment of belief or speech,” Cohen writes. “Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy.”
I’m waiting for a response from the ADL, but I can anticipate part of what it will say: new hate crimes laws aren’t really meant for cases like von Brunn’s, but violent crimes in regions where the racial, ethnic, religious or sexual orientation standing of victims means local authorities won’t investigate or prosecute with any vigor.
Read Cohen’s provocative column here.
Tags: ADL, hate crimes