This is bloody, sordid and freakish, but it suggests the logic of the principles now accepted: transvestite murder treated as hate crime. A man paid a prostitute for services and killed the prostitute when he found out it was a man. A representative of something called the “gay and lesbian liaison unit” at the D.C. police said the murder was being classified as a “hate/bias motivated” crime calling for a longer prison sentence than ordinary murder.
In this case, then, “hate” and “bias” include an aversion to having sexual relations with someone simply because the person is of the same sex. If you kill someone because of that aversion it’s worse, and of greater public concern, than if you kill him because of some more acceptable aversion. While it’s logical to define homophobic bias that way, so far as I know the point hasn’t been pressed in public until now. I wonder how soon it will make it into the schools?
Other features of the story that would be worth noting if they weren’t becoming so routine is the human-interest approach to the way of life of the deceased and the world in which he moved, and the matter-of-fact comments about “transexual sex workers.” In sex as elsewhere, “diversity” means that everything is the same as everything else.
Argh. I totally don’t want
Argh. I totally don’t want to get drawn into this because my latent PC instincts are tingling. And, yet, I feel compelled to make this observation.
Isn’t it odd that these circumstances should make a case for leniency. The perp – a walking skinsuit of moral leprosy, no doubt – felt swindled, defrauded, imposed upon, humiliated. He then reacted emotionally. Normally, those factors lessen culpability. If the perp had been swindled in the purchase of drugs, for example, and discovered that the the crack was sugar, his emotional state would be exculpatory (setting aside the possible felony murder rule issue.)
Except, here, we are to conclude that he is more culpable because his feelings of being swindled and made a fool, or somesuch, have a politically correct victim.
It just seems an exceedingly incoherent approach to legal principles.
Of course, nothing I say here should be construed as promoting violence against any group or excusing the victim……etc, etc.
How bizarre our society has
How bizarre our society has become, that why someone is murdered is more important than the fact that they were murdered, and that moreover, the true reason the murder happened actually doesn’t even matter, so long as there is an opportunity for leftist, radical egalitarian grandstanding and finger-waving against bad, bad anti-egalitarians. (I suppose they’d consider this prostitute-procurer a bad, bad rightist – at least, they’ll smear us all with his crime, as they did the whole Right after the Oklahoma bombing… As Mr. Bradley rightly pointed out, there’s no reason to imagine that hate was a factor rather than the john feeling defrauded and cheated and lashing out – but farbeit for leftists to want to uncover the truth, when they can make an example out of it – like they did with the Matthew Shepherd murder by thieving pickpockets…)
Of course, if the death penalty were in place there, there’d be no way to have lesser or greater penalties for “hate crimes” (real or imagined) – as Bush said in the debates when asked about his opposition to “hate crime” legislation, in light of the then-recent Texas white-supremacists’ murder of a black man, “They got the death penalty – how much more can they be punished?” Perhaps this is another reason for the left to oppose the death penalty for murder – it doesn’t allow one to increase the punishment if the murder was carried out due to “hate”.
Will you make a good point
Will you make a good point about “why someone is murdered is more important than the fact that they were murdered”. But I’m sorry to see that you turned it into a whole left-right issue. The fact of the matter is he killed someone for an unjustified reason. He should be sentenced for life. To your other point, yes the death penalty is wrong. I have seen of far too many cases when a man was found INNOCENT after he was executed. The problem really lies within our prison systems. They are like a community center, which is completely ridiculous. In my opinion, all prisons should be solitary confinement. That way prison won’t be a place of ‘community’, and will give the offender time to think about what they have done.