10 Truths About Hate Crimes

Coral Ridge Ministries
Dr. D. James Kennedy, Founder

From the 10 Truths Series
TRUTH # 3 Hate Crime Laws Criminalize Thought

Blowing whistles and wielding large foam boards, a mob of pink-shirted homosexuals surrounded 11 Christians on a Philadelphia sidewalk in October 2004. The homosexual “Pink Angels” were trying to drown out and hide the Christians from view as they brought the Gospel and God’s Word to a large public homosexual gathering called “Outfest.” Police soon brought an end to the confrontation, arresting the offenders for disorderly conduct and depositing them in jail, where they spent the next 21 hours.

But it was not the homosexuals who were put behind bars. It was the Christians.

Afterwards, a zealous local prosecutor charged the Christians, who came to be known as the Philadelphia 11, with eight felony and misdemeanor counts, including one count of “ethnic intimidation”—Pennsylvania’s term for a hate crime. The charges could have sent the Christians to jail for 47 years and forced them to pay $90,000 in fines.

Ted Hoppe, an attorney for the Christians, called it “the first case in the United States where someone was charged with a hate crime for ministering the Gospel in public.”

Assistant District Attorney Charles Ehrlich attacked the Christians not just for what they allegedly did, but for what they said. The Christians had read aloud the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality at the Outfest gathering, uttering what Ehrlich, in a pretrial hearing, called “hateful, disgusting, despicable words.”

All charges were later dropped when a Philadelphia County judge cut short prosecutor Ehrlich’s attempt to criminalize the words of Scripture. According to Hoppe, the prosecutor was trying to “send a message to these Christian evangelists that if you come down, we’re going to make it as painful to you as possible, so stay away.”

Enforcing Political Correctness
What happened in Philadelphia demonstrates how hate crime laws can be used to chill or silence free speech. They function as a legal tool to enforce political correctness. They empower police and prosecutors to arrest and charge offenders not for what they do, but for what they think and say. Hate crime laws add penalties to existing statutes when a crime committed is deemed to be motivated in some measure by a bias toward the victim. While such laws may be well- meaning, they give the state the power to police and penalize thought—which is both unconstitutional and a dramatic departure from the American legal tradition.

“The Founding Fathers believed that the law extended to action and not to internal subjective attitudes of people’s hearts,” said the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries. He called hate crime laws “extremely dangerous.”

Actions Only—Not Opinions
President Thomas Jefferson offered a concise outline of the American understanding of limited government when he wrote in his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists that “the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions….”

The idea that the long arm of the law may not reach beyond actions and assert jurisdiction over the minds of men is the foundation for free speech and religious liberty. It is a unique and precious safeguard to liberty—one rooted in the Bible and worked out in the Reformation. Renan, Nazi, fascist, and communist regimes, all of which rejected God and religious belief, have shown, again, that once religion is removed, a door opens into the abyss. The death toll from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their fellow communist henchmen is nearly 100 million people, according to The Black Book of Communism. Martin Luther, who risked death at the hands of the state for his opinions, put it this way,
The temporal lords want to rule the church, and, conversely, the theologians want to play the lord in the town hall. Under the papacy, mixing the two was considered ruling well, and it is still so considered. But in reality this is ruling very badly. .

Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, was a Puritan who subscribed to Luther’s view. He wrote, “An enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state confounds [mixes] the civil and religious, [and] denies the principles of Christianity.”

God Is Lord of the Conscience
The Westminster Confession, an authoritative statement of Reformation belief embraced by Puritan New England, declared that “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his Word.…”

This idea found political expression in the 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which abolished legal requirements to attend and support the established church. The Act declared that “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and drew up a formula for freedom taken from the life of Jesus Christ. Civil mandates over religious belief, the Act states, “are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do.”

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story restated the sanctity of individual conscience when he declared in his 1833 Commentaries on the U.S. Constitution,
The rights of conscience are, indeed, beyond the reach of any human power. They are given by God, and cannot be encroached upon by human authority, without a criminal disobedience of the precepts of natural, as well as of revealed religion.

Courts Support Liberty of Conscience
Liberty of conscience has been long upheld by American courts. The U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1929,
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought we hate.

The High Court came back to that principle in 1989, when it ruled that,
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.

Hate Crime Laws Punish Ideas
But that constitutional bedrock is imperiled by hate crime laws. Wendy Kaminer is a civil libertarian and former American Civil Liberties Union board member who opposes bias crime laws. “Hate crime legislation…,” she has written, “is expressly designed to punish particular thoughts or ideas.”

The Ohio Supreme Court agreed with the position, striking down a state hate crime law in 1992. The court warned that “if the legislature can enhance a penalty for crimes committed ‘by reason of’ racial bigotry, why not ‘by reason of’ opposition to abortion, war, the elderly (or any other political viewpoint)?”

One viewpoint for which Christians, such as the Philadelphia 11, could be sent to jail is opposition to homosexual conduct. Such opposition may be classified as a hate crime if legislation to add “sexual orientation” to the federal hate crimes statute becomes law. The Alliance Defense Fund has warned that such legislation may subject “politically incorrect speech to federal prosecution.” The measure defines “intimidation”—a term encompassing both speech and action—as violence. It could empower federal prosecutors to charge the proclamation of God’s Word regarding homosexual conduct—even from the pulpit—as a hate crime.

“The reality is that so-called hate crime laws are designed to punish people for what they think, feel, or believe,” said ADF Senior Counsel Glen Lavy. “Violent crimes should be punished regardless of the characteristics of the victim. ‘Hate crime’ laws are an effort to enforce the orthodoxy of political correctness and to curtail freedom of speech.”

The result of these laws is not greater justice, but unequal justice.