Eleven years
ago, this essay argued
against hate-crime laws. One argument read “People can eventually be accused of
hate crimes when they use hateful speech. Hate crimes laws are a seed that can
sprout in new directions.” This has now come to pass, I am sorry to say. This
week, the Congress passed S. J. Res. 49, and
President Trump signed it, making it part of the U.S. legal code.
The law rejects “White nationalists, White supremacists, the Ku
Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other hate groups…” But why? Because of their ideas?
Because of their expression of these ideas? No government that stands for
freedom and free speech, whose charge is to protect rights, should be singling
out specific groups by name and by law declaring them as outlaws or threats
because of their philosophies. If they have committed a crime, such as
defamation of character or incitement to riot or riot itself, then charge them
and try them. But American government has no legitimate authority to single out
some of its citizens in this way. This, furthermore, is an exceedingly bad precedent.
Who’s next?
The resolution is
too specific, but it’s also dangerously vague. The term “other hate groups” has
no known definition. Suppose that this term is defined by a group like the
Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC currently names 917 groups as hate groups (see here for a list). Their
criteria are not restricted to violent actions. They comprise SPEECH. They
say “All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire
class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” They are very
clear about this: “Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches,
rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.”
This Congressional
resolution is a declaration that certain kinds of groups, some named but many,
many others open to inclusion, are to be attacked by the U.S. government. The law
urges “the President and the President’s Cabinet to use all available resources
to address the threats posed by those groups.” The term “threats” in the first
paragraph is vague, dangerously vague. However, the very next paragraph singles
out free speech actions
when “hundreds of torch-bearing White nationalists, White supremacists,
Klansmen, and neo-Nazis chanted racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant
slogans…” The same sentence joins this with violent actions “…and violently
engaged with counter-demonstrators on and around the grounds of the University
of Virginia in Charlottesville…”
This
law regards free speech as a threat, linking it to violence, painting them with
one brush. There can be no justice that can stem from such a completely sloppy
and inexcusably amateurish legal treatment. This linkage is made clear in
paragraph seven with this language: “…communities everywhere are concerned
about the growing and open display of hate and violence being perpetrated by those
groups…” There is no distinction made here between the “open display of hate”
and “violence being perpetrated”. As I predicted 11 years ago in arguing
against hate crime laws, hate speech is being identified with hate crime.
I am just as uncomfortable with the notion of defining and
singling out “hate speech” as some sort of new danger or threat or harmful
activity or crime, to be dealt with by government or courts of law as I was 11
years ago with the idea of “hate crime”. The standard categories of crime are
quite enough without adding to them a government laundry list of prejudices and
aversions that everyone is not supposed to express or feel, under penalty of
government law.
Michael S. Rozeff [send him mail]
is a retired Professor of Finance living in East Amherst, New York. He is the
author of the free e-book Essays on American Empire: Liberty vs. Domination and
the free e-book The U.S. Constitution and Money: Corruption and Decline.
