RE: What do we think of this?
January 5, 2017 at 10:24 am
(This post was last modified: January 5, 2017 at 10:28 am by FatAndFaithless.)
(January 5, 2017 at 10:18 am)Alasdair Ham Wrote: I refer you to Boru's thread about whether motivation is relevant to morality or not.
Well, I'd say this isn't really about morality, but rather legality and legislation.
(January 5, 2017 at 10:23 am)robvalue Wrote: How utterly horrible
I'm not very well informed on what difference it makes if something is a hate crime. Does it mean tougher sentencing? If so, why?
I suppose hate crimes can be seen as inciting more violence by example.
FBI's definition (which is more or less identical to most definitions) - “a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
And yeah, it results in tougher sentencing. The issue is the laws are very unevenly enforced, and sometimes it can be very ambiguous whether or not a crime is a hate crime. On the other hand, in some situations it's explicitly clear that a crime fits the definition of a hate crime (as in the case in the OP), but it's not classified as such for one reason or another.
In every country and every age, the priest had been hostile to Liberty.
- Thomas Jefferson
- Thomas Jefferson