Conservative bigotry and Minnesota's proposed Hate Crime Legislation

image via the investmentunderground.com

Whether you wear an hijab or a yamulka, whether you speak Spanish or Swahili, or some other language than English, you shouldn't have to fear hate crimes.

I came across a couple of news stories about hate crimes in Minnesota, and an interactive map of the United States showing Trump supporter violence that included one of those stories - possibly inaccurately - in Minnesota. Please see the Minnesota instance on the map below.

The incident that shows up on the map for Minnesota was the beer mug face-bashing of a Muslim woman in an Applebee's restaurant, for speaking Swahili with her family.  The same woman testified in the judiciary committee legislative hearing on hate crimes on Friday.




To be fair, while this Minnesota incident above was, clearly, a hate crime, it is far less clear that the woman who committed the crime (allegedly) is or was a Trump supporter.  She might very well have been a supporter of one of the other candidates, or perhaps none of the numerous candidates running at the time may have been sufficiently extreme for her.  (The rest of the incidents on the interactive map appear to be more legitimately committed by Trump supporters.) However the notion the USA is, or should be, exclusively English speaking is more strongly a conservative one, and conservatives tend to reject the notion of learning foreign languages as well.  I'd go further; in my experience, Americans actually expect people in other countries to speak English to them, and object to those people speaking their own language in their own country.

The conservative position appears to be because it is more often conservative extremists  who are committing the hate crimes, not because of any legitimate rationale for opposing a change to hate crime law penalties.  Apparently hate and violence are conservative 'family values' they are trying to protect, or their notion of freedom. 

It is as ludicrous to assert that any other motive exists as it is to assert that conservative obstruction of the nomination of a replacement for Scalia to the SCOTUS is about "the will of the voters".  This is particularly evident now that Merrick Garland has been nominated and the GOP in the Senate have indicated they would confirm him after November 8th, but before the newly elected members of the Senate and the new president are sworn in if they lose the 2016 election.

Over the weekend, I watched that documentary,  "KKK: the Fight for White Supremacy"; and during the week I had caught the televised hearings from the MN lege on increasing the penalties for hate crimes in Minnesota. The woman in the Applebee's incident testified at that legislative hearing. The conservative legislators in the hearing opposed any increase in hate crime penalties, effectively trying to give cover, protection from consequences and penalties, to conservative hate criminals. They argued that to make hate crimes penalties higher was to exalt the victims of hate crimes over other victims. I certainly never heard the argument that when stiffer penalties were applied for users and vendors of the form of crack cocaine over powdered cocaine in enacting drug laws, that the victims of the harsher penalized crime were 'exalted', for example.  Rather the argument was that the harsher laws were intended as a deterrent to drug activity.   (I have yet to see anyone who reasonably believes a penalty for a crime 'exalts' the victims.)

It was interesting to me that in the state lege hearing on increasing penalties for hate crimes, one of those legislators in favor of increased hate crime law documented that of the immigrants over the time of our state's existence, only 25% came from English speaking countries, while the overwhelming majority of the other 75% did not speak English when they arrived, and spoke their native language among themselves.  In other words, who we are, who we have always been, has been multi-lingual.  Even early schools taught students in Swedish, and German, and other immigrant languages, not English.

There is an established premise of severity of penalties in law operating as a deterrent to crime.  While this does not appear to be true of the death penalty, it remains the premise for all of the legislation initiated by the right to be tough on crime that has led to our high incarceration rate.

It is worth noting that in being tough on crime, our incarceration level disproportionately locks up black and Hispanic people, largely for drug crimes and drug use, which in fact are crimes more frequently committed by relatively more affluent white people.

What distinguishes the nature of a hate crime from any other individual crime is that it is a crime against an individual or individuals which intimidates and affects a greater number of people in the same group, not only the direct victim.  This can be by intent, or it can simply be an effect; but the reality is that there is a larger and broader group of secondary victims.  In a very real sense, the direct victim of a hate crime is a proxy victim for the other members of the targeted group; attacking one is a means to attack all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the mass shooting in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last year, where the intention was to instigate a race war, which resulted in, among other effects, the removal of the civil war battle flag from state house grounds - to the disapproval of white racists.  Both the racism and the disapproval over removal of the flag, as well as the intentional intimidation of black citizens, was evident in the BBC documentary filming in South Carolina at the time of the mass shooting, "KKK: the fight for White Supremacy".  Those members who share the same targeted group as the shooting victims emphatically express being affected, as victims of intimidation, as a result of the hate crime - and it makes sense that they would do so.  Jews similarly have expressed feeling fear in response to anti-Semitic violence and hate attacks, a reasonable response, even when they were not the direct victims.

It is past the time when conservatives must stop defending and protecting hate criminals, and to start repudiating them and penalizing them.  Republicans must take back their party from extremists and tea partiers, and become a party of principles and real values again.  Let's start with the proposed law in the Minnesota legislature.

The Right Wing Wants to Institutionalize Hate, to Make It LEGAL Wrongly to Harm Others, Even Kill Them

George Zimmeman

I will be writing more on the failing of the vetoed Shoot First legislation separately, but I was struck this weekend by the racist overtones of a fatal shooting of a black teen by a white man with a violent past in Florida who had a legal carry permit.  It is an incident that is pertinent, because so far, the shooter has not been arrested, despite the young victim having been unarmed and much younger and much smaller than the shooter, with the victim weighing in at 140 lbs. to the shooter's 200 lbs. - in other words, he was not a plausible threat to the shooter.  The shooter had a concealed carry permit, despite a background which included violent conduct, including against law enforcement officers.  Zimmerman's victim had no violent events in HIS background, and in fact had saved his father's life, pulling his father to safety from a burning building.
More to the point, despite being directed by the police dispatcher NOT to follow this young man, the shooter did so.  Under the Shoot First legislation, it is legal to shoot someone while in your car, if you FEEL threatened, regardless if you actually ARE threatened.  The criteria for shooting becomes not objective, but subjective.  The duty to retreat, the obligation to attempt to avoid shooting someone if you safely can, would no longer exist.  It would be perfectly legal to go looking for trouble, to follow someone, to pursue shooting someone who was not pursuing or attempting to harm you.  This case has a number of facets which underline the problems with the recently vetoed Shoot First legislation, especially that only ONE side - the shooter's version of events - can be told.

The case of the Trayvon Martin shooting also brings up the issue of violence and hate crimes.  In the case of Trayvon Martin, the only basis that appears to exist for his being considered suspicious is that he is black, and was walking in a white gated community where black teens were not common.

View more videos at: http://nbcmiami.com/.

Alongside the above video from the Florida television station was this one, of two teens who tried to set another teen on fire.

View more videos at: http://nbcmiami.com/.

And last week in Kansas, there was this allegedly racist case of two other teens, who were black, who set a white middle school teen, 13 years old, on fire in what appears to be a hate crime.

In the recent Ohio shooting, the shooter may have singled out one of his victims because, allegedly, he was dating the shooter's ex-girlfriend., and the other victims were that victims friends who happened to be sitting with him.  If this is true, the shootings were not random. The shooter was described as something of an outcast, a loner with few friends.  His background was one of domestic violence.  While this shooter may not have been bullied at school, he appears to have been bullied and abused at home, both directly and as a witness to violent abuse, including intimidation using firearms.

What struck me about this was that when kids are expressing hatred, they resorted to other means than firearms.  Adults who have access to deadly force, as in the case of Trayvon Martin's shooting, also appear to seek to use it, when they have a reasonable expectation of getting away with it.

The FBI uses this definition of hate crime:

"Defining a Hate Crime

A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. For the purposes of collecting statistics, Congress has defined a hate crime as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation." Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties."

The kind of bias by frequency was broken down by the FBI for the most recent year available on their web site, 2010:

By bias motivation
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
■48.2 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a race.
■18.9 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a religion.
■18.6 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a particular sexual orientation.
■13.7 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against an ethnicity/national origin.
■0.6 percent were victims of an offender’s bias against a disability.

I was saddened, ashamed and disappointed to see that the Southern Poverty Law Center identified no less than 12 hate groups in the state of Minnesota, far fewer than were identified in the surrounding five state area.  They are listed below:

Aryan Nations 88 Neo-Nazi  - Mora
Crusaders for Yahweh Christian Identity - St. Paul
Crusaders for Yahweh Christian Identity - Duluth
Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ Black Separatist North - Minneapolis
National Socialist Movement Neo-Nazi
Parents Action League Anti-Gay - Champlin
Remnant, The/The Remnant Press Radical Traditional Catholicism  - Forest Lake
South Africa Project White Nationalist
True Invisible Empire Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Ku Klux Klan
Vinlanders Minnesota Racist Skinhead
Weisman Publications Christian Identity - Burnsville
You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide Anti - Gay - Annandale

This 2010 Fox News coverage of hate crimes confirms much of this:
Inside Militia, Hate Groups in Minnesota
Updated: Tuesday, 30 Mar 2010, 8:35 AM CDT Published : Monday, 29 Mar 2010, 9:47 PM CDT

MINNEAPOLIS - FBI agents arrested nine members of a Christian militia group based in Michigan, who were suspected of plotting to kill a police officer. These groups are everywhere. But a Homeland Security Intelligence report last month said extremist "chatter" is on the rise, which is the biggest increase since before the Oklahoma City bombing. In Minnesota, so-called militia and hate groups are a mixed bag.
Investigators say the group called Hutaree hoped their spree of violence starting next month would lead to an uprising against the entire U.S. government. The group's website says they are preparing to battle the coming antichrist. The suspects face charges of conspiracy as well as possessing a firearm during a crime of violence, teaching the use of explosives and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction.
The arrests offer an insight into radical groups, some of which operate here in Minnesota.
Charles Weisman is the owner of Weisman Publication, which is an online bookstore of extremism, publishing titles like, "America: Free, White and Christian."
The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks hate groups in the U.S.
In Minnesota, it identifies eight hate groups. It includes an eclectic list that has neo-Nazis in Austin, Minneapolis and Rochester and even the Ku Klux Klan, which has been active in Minnesota since the 1920's.
But there's also the Israelite Church of God in North Minneapolis, which it identifies as black separatists, who traditionally oppose integration and intermarriage and believe blacks, not Jews, are the "chosen people of God."
Weisman told FOX 9 he shares a racial philosophy similar to the founding fathers.
"They didn't necessarily consider them to have the same political, or mental equality at all times,” said Weisman.

I was struck by the convergence of hate crimes based on race, and by the attempts to make it legal to act in hateful, harmful ways.  In Anoka Minnesota, the high school had to contend with the right wing opposition to making the schools safe for gay students and other students who were targeted by bullying.  Those students were not shot or set on fire, but they were driven to suicide.  Attempts to make the school more safe were opposed by Right Wing Evangelicals who felt that denying their kids the right to bully other kids over their sexual orientation violated their religious right to hate, to condemn them as an abomination, an offense to God, and as un-natural.  

Among those in the area who are anti-gay, is one of the religious right wing extremist groups who are too widely accepted, the Bradlee Dean so-called ministry in Annandale, that appears on the hate list above.  Dean also likes to fear monger against Muslims over the fantasy that Muslims are trying to establish Sharia law in the U.S.  Dean's dubious ministry, which belongs to no denomination, and which has no clergy that have been ordained by any recognized organized religious faith so far as I can determine, is on the hate groups list, highlighted above.  One of his close associates, Michele Bachmann, has argued that it is unreasonable even to attempt to limit bullying because 'boys will be boys, and we wouldn't want them to be like girls".  (Apparently Michele Bachmann is unaware that girls in certain age groups are as likely or more likely than boys to be the ones doing the bullying.)  According to a September 2011 Huff Post article:

A string of suicides among gay and bullied teenagers in Minnesota's largest school district, Anoka-Hennepin Schools, has critics blaming the district's representation, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and anti-gay activists.
Over the last two years, nine teens in district schools have committed suicide, and Bachmann's allies are being accused of standing in the way of "blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish," Mother Jones reports. Bachmann signed a pledge this month stating that homosexuality is a choice.
The situation in Anoka-Hennepin Schools is so bad that Minnesota public health officials have deemed the area a "suicide contagion" because of the unusually high number of suicides and attempted suicides, according to the school district's website.
She historically wasn't a supporter of anti-bullying legislation. In 2004, she took part in a rally that pushed for the ban of gay marriage, according to the New York Daily News. Slate reports that in 2006, she said passing a bill that prevents bullying wasn't worth the time.
"I think for all of us, our experience in public schools is there have always been bullies," Slate reports Bachmann telling the Minnesota state legislature. "Always have been, always will be. I just don't know how we're ever going to get to the point of zero tolerance... What does it mean? ... Will we be expecting boys to be girls?"
Critics are arguing that Bachmann's impassiveness for bullying issues, her opposition to gay rights alongside Anoka-Hennepin Schools' controversial policy on teaching or talking about sexual orientation, creates a threatening environment for at-risk youth in the district.

We have racial, religious, and gender issue intolerance in the state of Minnesota.  We have violence, and we have hate groups, at least some of them part of the Minnesota right wing extremists that appear to have hijacked the GOP, and the conservative GOP auxiliary, the Tea Party, and similar groups in Wisconsin.  If the most extreme hate groups are not part of the mainstream of those groups, they are tolerated, and embraced when numbers are needed for conservative wedge issue causes.  They want to keep it legal to bully and harass others who they identify as 'other' and different.  They want to make it as legal as possible to go driving around in your car, by giving you a legal excuse to shoot someone else and not be held fully accountable on the basis of an objective criteria for self-defense.
The Heller SCOTUS decision of 2008 restricted the 2nd Amendment right to possess firearms to people in their homes for self-defense.  The Shoot First legislation, apparently drafted from behind the scenes by ALEC and funneled through the right wing majorities of our legislature before being vetoed, would extend that to vehicles and other locations.  The Shoot First legislation would - like the case above of Trayvon Martin, make it justifiable to follow someone in your car, provoke an encounter, a conflict, and then shoot an unarmed kid, so long as you subjectively felt afraid, regardless of objective criteria, like the victim of the shooting being younger, and much smaller, and unarmed.
Such legislation would give legal cover to crimes where unreasonable fear and bias hatred made shootings more likely.  It is an attempt to legalize hate activity, and potentially hate-motivated gun violence.
In this context we should remember that it was the case of R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, MN that overturned the ordinance under which a teen was prosecuted for burning a cross on the lawn of a black family, considered a hate crime straight out of the historic violent and terrorizing acts of the KKK.  There is a good case to be made that the right wants segregation of people, that it wants to justify a fear of black people in a white neighborhood, and wants segregated white schools, for example.  It is evident in their legislation, and in what they fund and defund.

In the early morning hours of June 21, 1990, the petitioner and several other teenagers allegedly assembled a crudely made cross by taping together broken chair legs.^[1] The cross was erected and burned in the front yard of an African American family that lived across the street from the house where the petitioner was staying.^[1] Petitioner, who was a juvenile at the time, was charged with two counts, one of which a violation of the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance.

Per the wikipedia entry on hate crime:

"Hate crime" generally refers to criminal acts that are seen to have been motivated by bias against one or more of the types above, or of their derivatives. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters (hate mail).[3]  A hate crime law is a law intended to prevent bias-motivated violence. Hate crime laws are distinct from laws against hate speech in that hate crime laws enhance the penalties associated with conduct that is already criminal under other laws, while hate speech laws criminalize speech.

The argument by the right is that they should not be penalized on the basis of the motive for their actions, they should not have an extra penalty for acting out of hatred and fear.  In point of fact, we take into account in determining what kind of crime occurs the motivation of people for all kinds of crime.  For example premeditation versus impulse of the moment violence is a criteria that frequently used to separate manslaughter from murder.  What the right is really worried about is being penalized for hating and fearing those they identify as other than themselves, and therefore wrong, bad, or dangerous for being different from themselves.

From the Opposition to Hate Crime section of the Hate Crime entry on wikipedia:

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously found the St. Paul Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance amounted to viewpoint-based discrimination is in conflict with rights of free speech, because it selectively criminalized bias-motivated speech or symbolic speech for disfavored topics while permitting such speech for other topics.[58] Many critics further assert that it conflicts with an even more fundamental right: free thought. The claim is that hate-crime legislation effectively makes certain ideas or beliefs, including religious ones, illegal, in other words, thought crimes.[59][60][61][62][63][64][65]
In their book Hate Crimes: Criminal Law and Identity Politics, James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter criticize hate crime legislation for exacerbating conflicts between groups. They assert that by defining crimes as being committed by one group against another, rather than as being committed by individuals against their society, the labeling of crimes as “hate crimes” causes groups to feel persecuted by one another, and that this impression of persecution can incite a backlash and thus lead to an actual increase in crime.[66]

That seems to me to be the crux of a range of right wing and specifically ALEC legisltion; we should not penalize the hate thinkers, speakers, and those who act hatefully, because we might hurt their feelings, we might prevent them from terrorizing people who are different from them in some way the right exaggerates or misrepresents.  They want greater freedom to influence and actively harm others, not simply hold their own views and beliefs.
The reality is, the right wingers want to make it easier, and more legal, to inflict their hate thought in the form of action to abuse others who think or believe or act differently than they do.  It is true in their opposition to hate crime laws, it is true in their opposition to schools protecting children from bullying by anti-gay evangelical students and others, it is true in how they craft the laws that would make it easier for them to shoot someone they didn't like by claiming fear or threat when no objective basis for it exists.  The right wing doesn't want people to be protected from their hatred, and they seek every opportunity, including the recent Shoot First legislation that was defeated, to do so.

In fact, they are perfectly free to believe or say what they like, no matter how hateful.  They are not free, and should not be given protection, to do so in a way that threatens others, either by actual violence or intimidation or harassment.  We have too many hate groups here in Minnesota, and far too many of them are actively and effectively politically connected to the right wing.  We need to be free from bigots spouting faux patriotism, false interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, and filiopietistic claims about the founding fathers in order to justify hateful speech and actions that harm others.  We have a variety of dominionists on the right running for President, who would make the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law, from the federal level down to School Boards, subordinate to their version of the Bible. We have a variety of right wingers who want a free pass to inflict any amount of pain, from verbal abuse and harassment to shooting those who are 'different' to be excused under law.

It would be dangerous to let that extreme form of right wing ideology pass their legislation, not any of it, and most certainly not that which allows people to shoot other people without objective justification, which allows them to pursue and harass other people to initiate the conflicts they subjectively use to justify those shootings.

But we should not allow them the less obvious cases of legislatively institutionalizing their hate under the justification of their faith either.  That is the danger of extremism; the GOP currently embraces extremism every time they treat the word 'moderate' or 'compromise' as dirty words, as things to be penalized, as a basis for opposition.  The right extreme is making war on the moderates in their own party, and they are making a culture war on the rest who are outside their party and their ideology as well. 

That is BAD legislation, it is dangerous legislation, in some cases LETHAL legislation; it should be fought against intensely.  The most fundamental right of people to be themselves, to be safe in their own communities or anywhere in the United States, regardless of their age, gender or sexual orientation, race or religion is at stake.  The essence of the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is on the line.