From the UK comes this example, one which I think sums up the problems with the notion that some crimes should be treated more harshly than others because of the "hateful" motive of the perpetrator.

There are of course violent offenders who specifically select gay men as targets: but are they any worse than those who pick on women, or homeless people? To create politically-approved hierarchies of culpability on such matters is to make a kind of nonsense of the law.

Take for example the case of the late David Morley, a gay bar manager who had survived the Admiral Duncan Soho pub bombing in 1999, which killed three people. That bombing was carried out by David Copeland, a 23-year-old engineer and Nazi sympathiser who had deliberately sought to murder gay men.

Five years later, Mr Morley and a friend were walking home near Waterloo in the small hours, when they encountered a four-strong group of teenage thugs who were "out to beat up tramps, druggies or just people on the street" and film the attacks on their phones. Mr Morley was a person on the street, and they beat him to death for it. There was no suggestion at the trial that they attacked him because he was gay.

What I find extraordinary, however, is any suggestion that Mr Morley's vicious killers are somehow less culpable because they didn't attack him for his sexual orientation. Yet that is the skewed logic of the "hate crime" legislation.

I know nothing of Mr. Morley beyond what was written in this article. But I also know that his death was no less a tragedy when he was murdered by a band of street thugs than it would have been if he had died in that 1999 anti-gay bombing. In each case, the motive can only be defined as contempt for one's fellow man -- and the basis for that contempt is strikingly irrelevant. Indeed, I'd argue that the sort of random street crime that took Morley's life is in some ways even more shocking to the conscience than the murderous attack on the bar he managed five years previously.

Why should his murder by rampaging hooligans bent on random mayhem be seen as less corrosive to society than an attack on a gay bar?

Why should his death at the hands of criminals with no regard for human life be seen as less worthy of harsh treatment it would have been if it had happened at the hands of a criminal with no regard for homosexuals?

So as I've said before, while I applaud those who want to end hatred for their efforts, I can't help but find their methods wrong-headed. After all, Morley isn't dead because his assailants loved him. And Morley's death was no less a offensive and worthy of punishment due to the fact that he was murdered because he was convenient rather than because of his sexual preference.

Posted by: Greg at 06:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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