(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.

Most would agree that it’s a hate crime if a white person attacks a black person while shouting racial slurs, but is it a hate crime if a black person attacks a white person while yelling anti-white sentiments? If a closeted gay man beats another gay man for coming on to him? If a middle-class woman tired of being hooted at on the street takes out her anger on one particularly vocal construction worker? If an Asian man gets into a petty scuffle with a Hispanic man and, irrationally fearing for his life based on subconscious biases, responds in a disproportionately violent manner? If a neo-Nazi attacks, for one reason or another, a light-skinned black person, without realizing that that person is black? Deciding which group memberships and differences are significant seems almost arbitrary.

But let’s put aside, for a moment, the hazy boundaries of the term “hate crime” and the inevitable Justice Stewart-esque “I know it when I see it” response. Let’s pretend that the lines between hate crime and plain old love crime are crystal clear, that motives can be determined without any doubt — should a hate crime be punished more harshly than a crime identical in all ways other than motive? The answer is a resounding no.

A common misconception about people who oppose hate crime legislation is that they are, a priori, bigoted — that their opposition can only stem from a lack of empathy for minority victims, a belief that they deserved their fate for being different. This is a ridiculously foolish assumption; to disagree with hate crime legislation is not to condone hate crimes, just as to oppose capital punishment for murderers is not to approve of murder.

That’s because punishment, on a judicial level, is not about avenging what has happened; it’s about preventing it from happening again. (Moral retribution is the job of the wronged party or whatever deity you believe in, or nobody at all.) Were revenge the goal of the criminal justice system, our society would be reduced to barbarism as criminals were tortured at the whims of the government. Punishment must be forward-looking, with the goal of obtaining the best possible consequences. This means focusing on two main principles: deterrence — preventing others from committing similar crimes — and preventing recidivism — keeping criminals who cannot be rehabilitated off the streets and in jail.

Which means that any argument in favor of hate crime legislation must prove one of two things: that hate crimes are uniquely situated such that a harsher punishment would act as a better deterrent to future hate crimes, or that those who commit hate crimes have a higher recidivism rate that would warrant a longer jail sentence. The latter of these suggestions seems improbable; is a person who violently kills a stranger for no apparent reason any less likely to do it again than a person who does it for a reason, albeit a terrible one (bigotry)? Both acts suggest such moral depravity that neither person should be allowed to return to society.

The other suggestion, regarding deterrence, is slightly trickier; while it’s probably true that increasing the punishment for hate crimes would have a greater deterrent effect, there’s no apparent reason why the punishment for similar non-hate crimes should not then be identically increased. The people who commit hate crimes are no more rational or better able to weigh long-term consequences against short-term “indulgence.” If a punishment is not severe enough to deter hate crimes, it must not be severe enough to prevent analogous non-hate crimes either, and to increase the punishment of one without the other is foolish.

But here is the crux of the argument: those who advocate hate crime legislation say that it is the elevated punishment of hate crimes — the additional weight they carry because of their motives — that is the important part, that sends the message that this society has zero tolerance of bigotry and so nobody should even contemplate being prejudiced. The harsher punishment is not to prevent other instances of the violent act itself; it’s to combat bigotry.

While combating prejudice is a noble goal, hate crime legislation is the entirely wrong way to go about it. Punishing bigotry does not eliminate it — it only makes it more insidious. It creates knee-jerk resentment and prevents the open exchange and debate of ideas, which is the only way to really abolish prejudice. Hate crime legislation divides people; it emphasizes differences; it sorts people into ingroups and outgroups, “can’t hurt” and “can hurt,” when we should be focusing on getting everyone into that ingroup. Everyone should be in the “can’t hurt” category. Every violent crime, every heinous act that denies a person his status as human, is a hate crime.