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Coral Ridge MinistriesDr. D. James Kennedy, Founder
He picked the wrong victims. David Wyant and his wife were at an Ohio state park in 1989 with their music turned up loud. After a black couple at a nearby campsite complained to park staff, Wyant turned off his tunes.
But about 15 minutes later the radio came back on and Wyant uncorked his anger, shouting a harsh and ugly remark within earshot of the black couple. “We didn’t have this problem until those n----- moved in next to us,” Wyant said. “I ought to shoot that black motherf-----. I ought to kick his black a--."
For that, Ohio convicted Wyant of ethnic intimidation—a hate crime and a fourth-degree felony—and sent him to prison for 18 months. The sentence was three times the maximum length he would have faced for the basic offense of aggravated menacing. If his victims had been white, he would have been charged with a first degree misdemeanor and faced jail time of 0-6 months or a fine.
A Two-Tiered System
That doesn’t sit well with many. The West Virginia Troopers Association asked their state legislature in 2001 to repeal its hate crime law. “We as police officers want to treat everybody equally. I don’t think the public would expect us to distinguish between a black person or a white one or a handicapped person or a nonhandicapped, gay or non-gay,” association executive director David Moye said in explaining the unusual demand.
Unequal Punishments
The practical effect of this system of varying punishments was, as legal scholar Daniel Troy has pointed out, to reinforce “a rigid caste system”—an outcome we will also see in America, if ideological law prevails.
God Has One Standard for All
True Justice Reflects God’s Character
Western law, based largely on the Judeo-Christian legal tradition, has progressively applied the principle of equality before the law. While the United States has not always lived up to that standard, its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…."
This powerful phrase was not “merely political rhetoric,” according to legal scholar Herbert W. Titus, “but was a deliberate endorsement of a political philosophy that would ultimately destroy special privileges in the New World.”
The Constitution Bans Special Rights
State constitutions also included provisions to remove special rights from the common law. The Oregon constitution, for example, included this provision,
The Fourteenth Amendment sought to correct the Founders’ decision to exclude African Americans from the full protection of the law. It affirms, as the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1879, “that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States….”
All Citizens Are Equal Before the Law
But under the hate crimes regime, the law no longer regards “man as man,” but as a member of a group. Equal justice gives way to a system of “preferential justice,” in which, as novelist George Orwell put it, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Fragmenting American Society
Some, however, are quite willing for this to happen; if it will advance their desired social agenda.
TRUTH # 4 Hate Crime Laws Violate Equal Justice Under the Law
He picked the wrong victims. David Wyant and his wife were at an Ohio state park in 1989 with their music turned up loud. After a black couple at a nearby campsite complained to park staff, Wyant turned off his tunes.
But about 15 minutes later the radio came back on and Wyant uncorked his anger, shouting a harsh and ugly remark within earshot of the black couple. “We didn’t have this problem until those n----- moved in next to us,” Wyant said. “I ought to shoot that black motherf-----. I ought to kick his black a--."
For that, Ohio convicted Wyant of ethnic intimidation—a hate crime and a fourth-degree felony—and sent him to prison for 18 months. The sentence was three times the maximum length he would have faced for the basic offense of aggravated menacing. If his victims had been white, he would have been charged with a first degree misdemeanor and faced jail time of 0-6 months or a fine.
A Two-Tiered System
Wyant’s conviction—he lost on appeal all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court—displays how hate crime laws create a two-tiered system of justice. Instead of equal justice under law, hate crime statutes impose more severe penalties when the victims belong to certain specially protected groups. The same crime brings different time—depending on the victims. Lady Justice is no longer an impartial arbiter of justice. Now she lifts her blindfold to peek at the skin color, ethnicity, gender, religion, and, in some states, the “sexual orientation” of the victim. Hate crime laws tip the scales of justice in favor of people from these protected groups—and no others.
That doesn’t sit well with many. The West Virginia Troopers Association asked their state legislature in 2001 to repeal its hate crime law. “We as police officers want to treat everybody equally. I don’t think the public would expect us to distinguish between a black person or a white one or a handicapped person or a nonhandicapped, gay or non-gay,” association executive director David Moye said in explaining the unusual demand.
Unequal Punishments
But hate crime laws offend not just West Virginia state troopers; they insult traditional American notions about equal justice. They also mark a return to the system of unequal justice that prevailed under the Code of Hammurabi seventeen centuries before Christ. The Code, like modern hate crime laws, called for varying punishments, depending not just on the nature of the offense but on the status of the offended. For example:
If any one strike the body of a man higher in rank than he, he shall receive sixty blows with an ox-whip in public.
If a free-born man strike the body of another free-born man or equal rank, he shall pay one gold mina.
If the slave of a freed man strike the body of a freed man, his ear shall be cut off.
The practical effect of this system of varying punishments was, as legal scholar Daniel Troy has pointed out, to reinforce “a rigid caste system”—an outcome we will also see in America, if ideological law prevails.
God Has One Standard for All
Unlike Hammurabi’s Code, Old Testament law called for equal justice, without respect to persons. The law God gave to Moses made it abundantly clear that one standard of justice was to apply to all. Moses told the ancient Israelites:
If You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness you shall judge your neighbor.” —Leviticus 19:15
You shall not show partiality to a poor man in his dispute. —Exodus 23:3
You shall not show partiality in judgment; you shall hear the small as well as the great; you shall not be afraid in any man’s presence, for the judgment is God’s. —Deuteronomy 1:16-17
True Justice Reflects God’s Character
Blind justice, introduced some 3,500 years ago in the law of Moses, is a requirement based on the character of God Himself.
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. —Deuteronomy 10:17
Western law, based largely on the Judeo-Christian legal tradition, has progressively applied the principle of equality before the law. While the United States has not always lived up to that standard, its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, states that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…."
This powerful phrase was not “merely political rhetoric,” according to legal scholar Herbert W. Titus, “but was a deliberate endorsement of a political philosophy that would ultimately destroy special privileges in the New World.”
The Constitution Bans Special Rights
Some of those special privileges were part of the common law inherited from Britain. American statesmen, Titus writes, set about to purge this body of British law of its “special royal and ecclesiastical privileges.” American distaste for special rights accounts for the ban in the U.S. Constitution on titles of nobility, a departure from the European habit of privileging the aristocracy above commoners.
State constitutions also included provisions to remove special rights from the common law. The Oregon constitution, for example, included this provision,
No law shall be passed granting to any citizen or class of citizens privileges, or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.
The Fourteenth Amendment sought to correct the Founders’ decision to exclude African Americans from the full protection of the law. It affirms, as the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1879, “that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States….”
All Citizens Are Equal Before the Law
Always honored, equality before the law was not always practiced, as in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court, to its shame, upheld a Louisiana law mandating the separation of black from white Americans. Justice John Marshall Harlan offered a lonely but powerful dissent.
There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.
But under the hate crimes regime, the law no longer regards “man as man,” but as a member of a group. Equal justice gives way to a system of “preferential justice,” in which, as novelist George Orwell put it, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Fragmenting American Society
That didn’t work for the Animal Farm, and it will not work for the United States either. Hate crime laws favor designated groups and will lead to the fragmentation of American society. When that happens, watch out. If justice is dispensed according to group membership, competing factions will have the power to use civil law to advance their own interests—at the expense of equal justice for all.
Some, however, are quite willing for this to happen; if it will advance their desired social agenda.
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