(My half of a Vs. in The Cornell Daily Sun. Josh Dugan’s opposing piece can be found at the Sun’s website.)

The term “hate crime” has always struck me as slightly bizarre. It implies that only a small subcategory of crimes stem from hate — that the remaining crimes are the result of, what, confusion? “Oh, dear, I seem to have bludgeoned you repeatedly with a blunt object. I do apologize.” Every violent crime is motivated by hate on some level, and to separate crimes based on type of hate is not only impossible but undesirable and counterproductive. Anyone who ties someone to a fence post, beats and pistol-whips him, and then leaves him for dead deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail with no parole — regardless of whether his victim, as Matthew Shepard was, is gay. I wish there were a magical balm that could cure society’s wounds, but hate crime legislation is no panacea.

First, there is the difficulty in establishing what, precisely, constitutes a hate crime. This difficulty exists on two levels: obviously it’s extremely hard to determine motive beyond reasonable doubt (without the aid of a foolproof lie detector), but more significantly, it’s extremely unclear which kinds of “hate” fall under the purview of “hate crimes” and how direct the connection between the hate and the crime needs to be.
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Like many college students, most of my knowledge of current events is gleaned from the headlines on the New York Times website, the first ten minutes of the Daily Show and, of course, NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics (newsflash: despite the fact that the women wear next to nothing and are often thrown bodily onto the ice by their bumbling partners, ice dancing is really boring!). For those of you who are as behind on the news as I am, a recap of some recent stories: the Vice President of the United States has gunned down an elderly man in an apparent effort to compensate for his lack of military service, the Danish butter cookie industry has been dealt a crippling blow by a Muslim boycott (their loss — who doesn’t love Danish butter cookies?), and everyone’s favorite no-nonsense talk show host, Oprah Winfrey, has been leading a campaign against James Frey for publishing a largely fabricated memoir.

I can understand peppering 78-year-old men in the face with birdshot and burning down consulates to protest accusations of being violent, but, frankly, Oprah’s one-blowhard crusade has left me scratching my head. Memoirs aren’t exactly a genre known for their accuracy, nor should they be; who wants to read about a person’s actual, mundane life, replete with poor comedic timing, esprit d’escalier, small dreams and big disappointments? The “true” anecdotes we share with others would, without a bit of poetic license, be boring beyond belief. In the retelling, the situation becomes just a little more dramatic; we become just a little wittier; ensuing hijinks become just a little zanier. As David Sedaris, the queen of the entertaining memoir, once said, “When people ask me if these stories are true, I prefer to say that they are true enough.”
So I don’t really care that Frey lied about the veracity of his novel — in fact, I wish more authors would follow suit. I don’t have a problem with people making things up and claiming they happened; I have a problem with people making things up and claiming they didn’t happen.
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