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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
Right Hate crimes are crimes of intent that need to be proven. Hate crime should not punish thought it should punish extremely evil intent.
A Gay man is a drug dealer. His partners in the business are straight. The Gay man is stealing money from his partners and the partners discover it and beat him to death while insulting the Gay man including using slurs you only use against gay people. In no way should this be classified a hate crime and the defense against it being a hate crime should be pretty powerful.
However when hate crimes can be proved in a court of law I think they should carry a more severe penalty then a crime that was not motivated by something so evil. If a man robs someone and kills them they should be punished for murder. Circumstances of the crime may merit a sentence like 25 years to life. They have the possibility of parole. That perhaps is just. Another man wants kills one black man which was the start of a campaign to kill many more African Americans. That guy should almost certainly, in my view, be punished more severely then the first man even though they both only killed one person.
If that is what “hate crime” means I am on board. If “hate crime” means measuring level of emotion in someone’s head or level of “hate” in their heart with no physical evidence of their motivations. Then I am against 100% these things can’t be proven and have no place in court.
This is incredibly depressing and does not speak well for the future of our country…
I am truly sorry, Brian. I wish I could paint a more positive picture, but the nearly 45 years I spent in the public school system was a period of watching the world I had grown up in dismantled. In my final year I saw posters of Travon Martin with references to Skittles all over the halls of the building before I had even heard anything about the case. Black teachers were proselitizing to their students the notion that blacks were being victimized by white society. No one in the administration of the building thought that it was inappropriate for teachers to do this kind of propagandizing when so little was yet known about the circumstances. When I started teaching and for many years thereafter it was not considered appropriate for teachers to discuss any controversial issue unless they were fully informed and able to present both sides of the issue, and only then if it related to the curriculum of their class. Now that only applies to issues which challenge the the leftist perspective.
What we experienced early on in the 1970s was in its formative stage. In 1988 I was teaching in a middle school under a very well recognized racist, black principal. He required that the entire faculty sit through a 2 hour presentation by a professor from the University of Washington Department of Black Studies. The professors’ contention was that blacks were the major initiators of Western Culture. He claimed that the entire Mediterranean basin was populated by blacks. That ancient Rome and Greece were, in fact, black African countries. Part of his proof was that the statues of the statesmen of this period all had curly hair. A number of the staff members were African Americans, and most were friends of mine. We exchanged looks throughout the lecture that told me they were embarassed by this idiocy. And, yet, this man was a tenured professor at a major state university, and was given a good deal of academic credibility, enough so, that the school district paid whatever his fee was to give this lecture, again, at a time when money in the schools was very tight.