By Edwin Cooney
Really, I’m not much of a hater. Argumentative I can be indeed, but only occasionally am I ever really angry when I argue or -- if you prefer -- debate with someone.
I’m occasionally angered when provoked during a debate, however hate isn’t the result of either my frustration or my anger. If I hate anything at all (aside from asparagus, coconut baked into candy, cake, pie, and pudding (cookies excepted), maple flavoring in any food and thorns on any plant of any sort), the object of my hatred is usually attitudinal or ideological, but never personal.
I think it’s fair to observe that most people link the emotions of anger and hatred pretty closely together. However, President Richard Nixon once taught us that anger and hatred aren’t necessarily connected. The scene was the East Room of the White House. The situation was a rare 9:00 p.m. Friday night press conference in October 1973. The issues at hand had to do with the President’s involvement or non-involvement in various aspects of the Watergate scandal. The President was obviously (to say the very least) frustrated with the persistent press and media. Most everyone was already sure that President Nixon hated the press due to his perception that he was a lifelong victim of press and media contempt. However, that night he set us straight. When CBS reporter Robert Pierpoint asked about his anger toward the press, the President asserted that “…one can only be angry with those he respects.” Although President Nixon didn’t openly declare his hatred for the press that night, he made it abundantly clear how he really felt.
Okay Mr. President, so I now understand that I don’t even have to be angry with someone in order to hate them—WHAT A RELIEF! I’m also assured that people, very often, do indeed hate other people they’ve never met and will never meet.
The reason for that, I’m told, is because they’ve been taught to hate. I’m also assured that the most effective antidote of such hatred is “anti-hate crime legislation”.
Okay then, I hate “hate crimes,” too. However, I’m more than a little dubious as to the value of their designation in assisting law enforcement. As a matter of fact, my dubiousness as to the value of hate crime legislation is one of the few issues that I have in common with many of my Conservative friends.
My old dictionary defines hate as: “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from anger, fear, or a sense of injury…extreme dislike or antipathy.”
As for the question of whether fear rather than anger is the real basis of human hatred, that’s a most compelling topic for another time. As they used to say in the broadcast industry: “stay tuned”.
Since around 1990, the federal government and well over half of our states have passed “hate crime” laws. These laws make it an “add on” crime if you assault or murder anyone whom you hate because they’re black, white, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or disabled — anyone who can be designated as belonging to a special category of people. Thus, most people think that a crime is even more heinous if it’s the result of racial, ethnic, or religious bias or prejudice.
Of course, I’m willing—like the best American politicians—to go on record as a despiser of racial prejudice, ethnic bias, sexual orientation, phobia or religious bigotry. What puzzles me, however, are some of the factors having to do with the establishment of “hate crimes”.
Call me naive or insensitive if you must, but I was raised to believe that committing a “crime” was hateful in itself—or, at the very least, blatantly selfish. Of course, one can’t be charged with a “hate crime” unless one is first guilty of an already established crime such as assault or murder. Not only are assaults and murder hateful enough in themselves, there is no universal agreement among the states as to which hatefully committed crimes ought to be specifically categorized as “hate crimes.”
Author Debbie Wright makes this point most emphatically in her December 2002 article on hate crimes in the International Encyclopedia of Justice Studies (see http://www.iejs.com/Law/Criminal_Law/Hate_Crimes.htm).
“On the night of February 19, 1999, in Sylacauga, Alabama, Steve Mullins asked his friend Charles Butler to help him kill an acquaintance named Billy Jack Gaither. Butler agreed and watched Mullins beat Gaither with an ax handle and burn his body on top of a pile of tires. Shortly after the crime, they turned themselves in to the police and admitted to the killing. Both men were convicted of capital murder and received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Although Mullins, a neo-Nazi skinhead, killed Gaither “cause he was a faggot,” the murder did not make the FBI hate crimes report.
Alabama’s hate crimes law does not apply to crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation.”
As Ms. Wright points out, “hate crimes” only reflect the values of the community which adopts them. Hence, just as no upstanding citizen in Alabama today would openly encourage anyone to commit murder, neither would anyone suggest that Mullins and Butler were given permission to murder Gaither by the absence of sexual orientation as a “hate crime” in Alabama. If there is an up side to the above story, it’s that Butler and Mullins had enough conscience to turn themselves in for their dastardly deed.
The fact that the adoption of hate crime legislation reflects state or regional mores raises a concern not addressed by Ms. Wright in the above article. If one type of attitude can be legislated, what about other types? If hate crime legislation is a positive element in our historical as well as present day struggle against crime, may we very soon look toward to the adoption of anti-love crime legislation?
With the likely exception of hate, what human emotion has been a greater motivator of crime than love – love which was misplaced, reckless or improper? Consider the following:
How many “love” relationships have ended in murder?
How many children live in poverty or subsist on welfare due to ill-considered “love relationships” that we call marriage?
How many children have been unwisely but lovingly denied access to cancer treatments that might have saved their lives due to deeply caring and religiously principled parents? How many abortions were performed in the last year because babies were conceived under the guise of urgent passion rather than as a true blue act of love within a “love relationship?”
Finally, since every politician seeks to provide relief to the taxpayer at all levels of government, does anyone not realize how much mismanaged love costs the sacred tax payer each year? If hate can be governed by law, why shouldn’t we expect that soon badly abused motives and practices of love won’t be codified by state governors or even by the signature of the President of the United States? There are already suggestions for proposals that only couples properly evaluated and licensed should be allowed to procreate.
The adoption and monitoring of hate crimes is, of course, a well-intentioned extension of the 1960s civil rights movement which is in many respects is hard to oppose. However -- and this is one aspect of the civil rights movement that is often misunderstood by both Conservatives and Liberals -- necessary and effective civil rights legislation didn’t seek to regulate attitudes . Effective civil rights legislation sought to regulate behavior. As Dr. King once observed: “The law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that’s pretty important.”
Effective civil rights legislation governs human activities as do many essential laws that govern everything from traffic management to the punishment of treason and capital murder. Reckless drivers, those who would commit treason, murderers – they may all be hateful people, but they must especially be managed because they’re dangerous to the peace and safety of us all. Does anyone believe that enough prison cells can or should exist to hold all of the people of the world with hate in their heart?
Standing in the East Room of the White House -- the same room from which he’d asserted that anger was an emotion applicable only to those one respects -- President Nixon, on the day his resignation from the presidency became effective, made one of the most powerful anti-hate observations I’ve ever heard:
“…always remember,” asserted the clearly saddened and humiliated Richard M. Nixon, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself.”
As for me, the non-hater, I take President Nixon’s leadership on the separation between hate and anger very seriously. I used to hate asparagus, coconut baked into candy, cake, pie and pudding (cookies excepted), maple flavoring in any food as well as thorns on plants of any sort. However, because these are respectable and desirable entities, I no longer hate them. I am simply mad at ‘em!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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