Word: hatefulness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Which is why it's difficult for me to say that I think she's wrong about what could become her son's most important legacy: a hate-crimes bill before Congress called the Matthew Shepard Act. The bill would expand, far too aggressively, the two existing federal hate-crimes laws. One is from 1968; it allows the Federal Government to prosecute crimes committed on the basis of race, religion and national origin when the victim is engaged in public activities like going to school or eating at a restaurant or attending a concert. The other is from...
...difficult to argue against hate-crimes laws because it seems like you're arguing for hate. But the term "hate crimes" didn't come into wide use until the early 1980s. The original 1968 law was part of its decade's civil rights legislation, but at the time, the law was not considered to be a law against "hate...
...Hate-crimes laws feel great to enact, but they criminalize something vital in a democracy: the right to be wrong. Let's say you chop off my arm because I'm gay. I would hope you go to prison for a long time, but should your sentence be even longer just because I sleep with guys and you disapprove? Don't people have a First Amendment right to disapprove? When did the U.S. government get into the business of criminalizing people's thoughts...
Proponents have made several arguments for hate-crimes laws, but the most common is that the laws address entire communities, not just particular crimes. As the Justice Department said in a 1999 publication about hate crimes (click here for a PDF), "when crimes are committed because of our differences, the effects can reverberate beyond a single person or group into an entire community, city, or society as a whole...
...when FieldReport's first official monthly contest ended, the skeptics were silenced. A total of $25,000 in checks went out to the authors of the winning stories in each of FieldReport's contest categories (there are 21, from "Animal Beings" to "Life + Me" to "Love + Hate" to "Style+Beauty+Body"). The most highly ranked story on the site for the month won an extra $4,000 prize. In July, $40,000 had gone out to the victors of a trial-run "beta" contest, including a grand prize of $20,000 to the author of the most popular story overall...