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Hate Violence is a Hoax
The title of this brief post is clearly clickbait, obviously horrible crimes have been perpetrated due to hateful motivations, but the whole idea of “hate violence” itself is philosophically troubling.
Actress Ellen Page recently wrote a piece responding to the Jussie Smollet fiasco that included these words:
“Cruel words and laws and beliefs cause real suffering. Queerphobia/transphobia is violence perpetrated on our children, our families, our friends and neighbors and the forgotten among us who have no voice. We all have to work together to end the normalization of anti LGBTQ+ sentiment and rhetoric.”
All through the piece Page tries to convey that homosexuals face catastrophic life-threatening hatred. But this paragraph proves that her thinking isn’t really about violence or liberalism. She is being fundamentally illiberal. She wants us to believe that the non-acceptance of her worldview is an act of hate violence towards her.
This is insidious for many reasons. As a Christian, the most obvious one is that to accept it would force us to be ashamed of God’s revelation. The very existence of the Bible is an act of hate violence according to Ellen Page. So when people say they’re coming for your Bibles…well some of them kind of are. The difference between what I am arguing here and some Magahat wearing vlogger is that I don’t think you have anything to fear. Not really.
Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” is hard to characterize because it’s really just basic Christianity. In fact, it really is about as close to the Christian concept of “Social Justice” as one can find today. What passes as so-called social justice today has been sucked dry of any real content by the word social. The brilliant economist FA Hayek called social a weasel word for this very reason. It sucks the life out of whatever it touches.
But the “Benedict Option” is really just the idea that the church can fail. Not ultimately. Christ’s bride will remain as a remnant trampling over the works of the devil somewhere till the end. But in America? Great Britain? Yes, the gathering of Christ’s followers could easily disappear in any country. We aren’t called to be successful. We are called to be faithful. We aren’t called to enact justice. We are called to be justice. We are called to be the Shalom within the world.
More and more Christians are buying into the illiberalism of intersectional justice. This is a philosophy of utter nonsense designed by Bourgeois elites in order to either soothe their own guilty conscience or grasp at the power of the social class that sits just above their heads. Most college professors are an example of the first and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is an example of the later.
But no matter how we slice it intersectional justice contradicts Christ’s worldview. The apostle Paul taught us that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no man or woman. Paul being a good Jewish man didn’t think that in Christ these things were obliterated. He knew that in Christ differences were reconciled. This is the peace that the church is called to. That when we are brothers and sisters together we harmonize sex, class, race, and even religious difference. A tapestry without different threads is nothing.
For the Marxist, class justice is the obliteration of class. For the Christian, it is the Samaritan taking care of a Jew. It isn’t a government policy, it is actual peace between persons.
A murderer is not more murderous if the perpetrator screams “FAG” as the knife goes in. A lynching is not worse when it’s five whites hanging a black. Murder is murder.
Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan in order to make this point, that your group identity is literally nothing. The manlyingg in the road, beaten and bleeding, was ignored by his group. And a man from a group he was supposed to hate saved him. And the question is who was a neighbor to this man? His actual group neighbors, his fellow Jews failed him, but someone they considered to be a “faggot” or a “n word” or whatever slur you want became his true neighbor. This is the philosophy that heals the hate of identity politics. This is the philosophy that causes a Muslim in Speaker’s Corner to put his arm around the Christian he was just fiercely debating in order to rebuke a woke atheist by saying “this man believes in God, scripture, Angels, miracles, and prophets. This man is my brother.”
If Ellen Page actually cared about so called hate crimes, her Op Ed would’ve been about how horrible people like Jussie Smollet, Julie Swetnick (member her?), or Nathan Philips are. It would’ve been about how the company that built Fearless Girl “agreed to pay over $5 million in settlement over gender pay discrimination, just 6 months after the installation of the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street.”
The hypocrisy and outright lies perpetrated by these “champions” of intersectional justice expose how shallow the concept is. So Page must write about how her life is endangered by the Bible. But the Eternal Things are the only things that can create peace between persons. Virtue signaling and labeling things as hate speech cannot do this. And peace between persons and God is the only real peace there can be this side of the eschaton.
As the Talmud says:
“Whoever destroys a single life has destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life has saved the world entire.”
Published in General
You state: All through Page tries to convey that homosexuals face catastrophic life threatening hatred. But this paragraph proves that her thinking isn’t really about violence or liberalism. She is being fundamentally illiberal. She wants us to believe that the non acceptance of her worldview is an act of hate violence towards her.
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And it is even worse than that. The world view that Page and others like her are defining involves how others must be labeled, shunned and exiled for the slightest perception on their part that we are acting toward them in less than the proper manner. Plus the proper manner is defined by them, with rules that change weekly or even hourly.
Roseanne was barred from the world of prime time TV for one careless and ignorant remark. Yet Kathy Griffin’s career remains intact.
It has been remarked by wiser souls than I that there is no activity we conservatives can undertake toward any liberal who happens to be a person of color, or gay. The burden falls heavily on writers, film producers and directors. Should we attempt to be inclusive, we are appropriating their culture. If we don’t make mention of gays or people of color, we are racist scum. Set up inside this lose/lose proposition, we need to take our country back.
Those words formed the mission statement for a progressive blog that I belonged to only 3 years ago. Now the words “take our country back” will label the speaker as being a White Supremacist, because David Duke once used them with great frequency.
Murder can be made worse by what a person is trying to accomplish with the murder.
So take a man punching another man so hard he dies.
In all cases a man threw a punch and killed someone but a our law should recognize the different circumstances in each of he cases and should definitely punish each crime with different severity. There should not be the same response to each the five crimes listed should there?
Perfect…
Great post.
And it’s not better if it’s 5 blacks hanging a white.
And the hereafter, with its judgment.
Here’s the real problem: neither Ellen Page nor Jesse Smollett nor the rest of them understand grace. And that’s probably not really their fault, because most Christians don’t understand grace.
There was a time when God’s people (the Israelite of the old testament) had a collective faith. If the king screwed up, then the people paid a price (see David and his census). If one person sinned, it brought wrath upon the lot of them (see Achan and the silver he hid in his tent). That is not our Christian faith any longer.
We are not called to look over at our neighbor and see if they are doing what they ought. What we are called to do is show mercy (again, see David: “you show mercy to the merciful”). We are all sinners, and if we truly understand our sin, and how the grace of God covers our sin completely, we’d be merciful. But our nature, whether Christian or not, is to minimize our own sin and look instead to the people around us and try call out how they are living poorly. This is what Christians do to each other, and to the folks in “the world”. And it is what Ellen Page does to anyone she disagrees with. This is what Lewis called the “insidious self”. That part of us that looks to judge others for not living up to the expectations we have of them.
If we understood grace better, the would would be a better place.
This takes us back to the hate crime BS. This makes law pernicious.
The person didn’t intend to take life = manslaughter
The person did intend to take life + murder
On #5 you can tack on insurrection or what ever the statute declares.
Not number one. Maybe that was self-defense. But the others all show criminal intent. Why is 2 less than 4? Maybe because it is aimed at a whole group? OK.
But just how do we punish motives that we regard as more venal than others without getting into thought-crime territory? That is the problem. If the government cannot regulate speech, it surely cannot regulate thought. If an American has any right at all, surely the right to love and its inverse to hate must be one. But to ACT on that is an entirely different matter.
I don’t have time to break down each one, but several of those aren’t murder and other crimes are involved in leading a lynch mob so I don’t think these examples merit much reflection. But keep this in mind: prior to the civil war there were more lynchings in the south than the 2,000 plus ones we know about under Jim Crow. And since black slaves were property all the antebellum lynchings were of whites by other whites because the law forbade destruction of property…why is this never discussed? Cross burning was an old Scottish practice that had nothing to do with Black Americans. Evil is evil. Murder is murder. A heart may be darker due to intent but that is God’s business.
Thank you
Thank you. We need to have you back on our podcast soon
Amen.
I’d be honored.
I mean proof of evil intent should be taken into account, especially regarding things like the Nazi war crime trials. But that’s part of the problem: woke jags want every crime to be the holocaust (except anti semitism ironically). The Shoah was special. Jim Crow was special. Rawanda was special. And by special I mean exceptional and by exceptional I mean unique. It demeans the tragedy of these horrors to call a beer can thrown followed by Fag a HATE crime. That is a horrible thing to do, especially to a homosexual. But it’s not the Shoah. It’s not a lynch mob. And it’s hard to prove intent without admission or corroboration so before human law it’s just not that relevant. God knows. That’s a fundamental part of real conservatism: God knows and no one escapes his love and wrath.
Hey I just want to say how much I love you guys. I just got back on Facebook for the first time in 6 years and I forgot what a Mos Eisley Cantina that place is. You people are on the side of the Angels.
So true.
@iWe awhile back had a nice post on this. I thought he underplayed the part about G-d knowing, what with the Lord seeing the heart of David’s brothers and all. But he did a great job, as I recall thinking at the time, talking about how unimportant this sort of thing should be for legal and social purposes.
(My tags don’t usually work. He probably won’t know I said this unless we PM him.)
Unfortunately much of the problem of intended mayhem, and trying to control that problem is based upon a false premise that laws can actually prevent someone from doing something evil, or the more banal, doing something stupid. Laws are written to deal with specific crimes in a consistent manner.
Laws, or statutes are written to define the crime, and then include elements to categorize that crime. The statute also contains specific defenses to that crime.
Intent to commit a crime, and to take steps to commit a crime are well outside the control of laws, or the written word. The solution is always to write a new law by those who cannot understand why people are still committing crimes. Some street wisdom from a former cop if you like, people commit crimes because they don’t think they will be caught, and arrested.
Treason is a thought crime. Any crime with a specific goal in mind is a thought crime. Terrorism is a thought crime. I think most of the objections to hate crime is there attempts to say generic things like a white person killing a black person is worse than a black person killing a black person. We rightly reject that. Murder is murder. Murder done with even a more sinister person and a greater goal of even more evil deserves more severe punishment.
Hate Crimes in general are rare and they should be hard to prove but when one really takes place it should be punished more severely then say a random crime that had similar effects.
If an arsonists really is burning down every black home in a neighborhood to drive out the blacks that should be treated as a worse crime than someone burning down a house for insurance money.
All of them are murder. So, I think the examples need more reflect than you gave them.
Because it is not true. Slave revolts in the South of any level were punished with mass slayings of slaves to teach a lesson. Lynching in general should be punished more severely than simple murder because the implications of the crime are community wide. That level of lawlessness should be met with more severe punishment. Your more general point that whites have lynched plenty of whites is true however and it seems to have been memory holed for some reason. You do get the impression that only African American have ever been lynched. That is not good for us as a society.
So, how do you deal with Treason as crime? Should treason not be a crime?
We completely agree on this point!
This is also true but it is not always hard to prove, sometimes the intent is made plain to all and it is exactly in those circumstances that the punishment should be more severe.
Treason is not a thought crime, else half the country would be in jail. Arson is not a thought crime it is an action. So is terrorism. I am not really a libertarian, but I still reject the whole notion of “hate crime” and “hate speech.” An emotion is not an act in itself. There is plenty to punish in the act itself. If I get mugged and left unconscious and someone else gets the same treatment, only his assailant had more hate in his heart than mine am I supposed to feel fine with my guy getting a lesser penalty when I bled just as much real blood as the other poor victim? Still, I get where you are coming from. It seems you think race hatred is worse than money greed.
I think governments usually follow utilitarian approaches–we go by harm done. Two drivers decide to drive drunk. One is lucky and gets home ok. The other kills a kid. Both are morally equal, being equally reckless of others’ welfare. But the one whose action had a worse result will be punished more than the other if caught. Morality and law are quite different.
My whole problem with leftism and intersectionality starts at a very basic level. I am an individual. I associate myself with no particular group. I have been a member of groups in my life, most, if not all, proved to be in some way unrepresentative of how I saw myself. I ultimately chose to disassociate myself from them. As a teacher, disliked the Union or association. As a climber I found I enjoyed solo climbing far more than climbing in a group. Now, as cyclist, I much prefer to ride alone. Politically, I tend to think of myself as somewhere in the realm of conservatives, but I don’t agree with any set definition of that term as it applies to me. As a teacher, I deeply resented the claim that I was a member of a “white collective”, a charge which seemed to be brought up at the workshops that started each school year. I don’t belong to any collective. My ideas are my own. I take full responsibility for them and their development.
It doesn’t stop there. I have always taken people I have met as individuals. I don’t judge them by their race, religion, political ideas, clothing, or any of the other possible things we could use to pigeonhole someone at first sight. What I do do is to listen to what they have to say or how they act. The respect they show to me for who I am, not as a symbol, but as a person.
I have known and been friends with a wide variety of people, some rich, some poor, some well educated, others profoundly ignorant of all but basic decency. I resent deeply the implications of intersectionality, the attempt to put everyone into a box that represents only one aspect of their being, and then setting up conflicts which only benefit the manipulators of the system. We are all individuals, unique in so many ways. Why must we be judged and classified on what is likely the least important parts of our totality? I refuse to be so manipulated.
I agree with your entire statement, and I thought the ideas you tackled in your last paragraph were eloquently expressed.
This is not true.
A man takes papers that do not belong to him and he is not authorized to take. This is a simple case of theft. Yet he is charged with treason. How could that be?
Both these statements are true. We should never make any emotion illegal.
Two men each shoot a different man dead on the street. One man is charged with Felony murder and robbery the other man is charged as a terrorist. They were both charged appropriately wiht ample proof. How do we justify the difference in the charges?
This is not how hate crime works in the real world. No Prosecutor has ever claimed the defendant has 20% more hate in his heart than other muggers. How would we know that? If you are mugged it is not a hate crime. If you were beaten to a pulp because you were walking to a Bible study and Antifa thug hates all Christian scum and wanted to drive the Bible study out of his neighborhood you might very well have a hate crime on your hands and calling that attack a “mugging” would be inaccurate at best and more likely deceptive.
Well the actions are worse, typically, normally if what the criminal wants is money they tend to not use an abundance of force to get it. Hate drives the violence up. If a cop sees a victim with one fatal stab wound and then sees another victim with 12 fatal stab wounds the cop already knows the motivations for the crimes are likely different and there something going on with the murderer to drive him to stab his victim 12 times.
Very true.
I wrote a post about Austin Channing Brown’s book “I am still Here” Black Dignity in a World made for Whiteness.
In that book she claims one of the main drivers of racism is your lack of ability to see your self as White and notice your Whiteness all the time. She would claim that because you see people as individuals that makes you more of a racist. It is really terrible. So your comment here is right on.
Also, my homeboy Mencius:
Those are crimes of intent that need to be proven. You aren’t being penalized for having a thought you’re punished for an extremely evil intent. Technically you’ve found the counter example but it’s not comparable to throwing a rock at a gay.
Back in 1971 I was at a school at which I had taught for two years. The faculty was terrific, enormous cohesion, no conflicts. In comes a new, experimental unit called the Human Relations Taskforce. My school was subjected to a semester long daily dose of one hour sessions at the start of every day during which every effort was made to make individual teachers aware of their race as opposed to every other teacher’s race. Individuals were encouraged to talk about any slight or perceived slight that they might have felt from someone of a different race (what are now called “microaggressions”). White teachers were essentially set up as targets in a shooting gallery while black, Asian, and Native Americans were given the metaphorical guns to shoot with and encouraged to do so. At one point I went to my principal and told him, I am working on a daily basis with students who are classified as emotionally disturbed. I can’t continue to do that and attend these sessions with emotionally disturbed adults. He told me not to say anything to anyone else, just to remain in my classroom every morning. I was deeply relieved. However, the rest of that year and a good deal of the next showed just how effectively the Human Relations Taskforce was able to destroy the harmony and collegiality of a faculty. People who had been close friends no longer talked to each other. The two adjoining faculty rooms (smoking and non-smoking) became enclaves. Resentments seethed right on the surface between blacks and whites. Old wounds, like the Japanese internment, were rehashed, as though those of us who weren’t even born during that period were somehow to blame. It was incredibly ugly, but it was just the beginning. The last 48 years has made this a movement that now everyone has to deal with on an almost daily basis. If this movement had been started by the Frankfurt School it could not have been more successful in achieving the ultimate goals of that group of radicals.
Over the remaning years I spent in the schools (all but a five year period in the 1980s when I worked in the financial services industry) I was forced to attend sessions of this type at least once a year. Such organizations as The Courageous Conversation bilked school districts out of millions of dollars which could have been used for books and supplies at a time when I bought pencils and Xerox paper out of my own money because the district was out of money to provide supplies. They became more subtle, but the message was the same divide, divide, divide! They added new victims to the list, but always the victimizer was the same, White Males. And this at a time when schools were screaming for men to come into teaching.