Word: hating
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...women wouldn't give me their names. They said they were worried about what the store's owner might think. The reason I've mentioned them is that later, when those poll results came in, I recalled another thing the woman behind the counter had volunteered. "I would hate to think that anyone would vote against Obama because of who he is," she said, "but I also don't like the idea of people voting for him just because he's black...
...then obscure Baptist minister named Al Sharpton led a march through Brooklyn, a march that itself nearly led to violence. A few months later, New York mayor Ed Koch wrote a New York Times op-ed explaining that his "outrage" at the incident had led him to support hate-crimes laws. "Hate crimes, if not responded to, tend to undermine the tolerance necessary in our pluralistic society," he wrote...
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...
...caused Griffith's death were harshly punished without the use of any hate-crimes law. And if the very existence of a hate-crimes law is meant to placate minorities so they don't riot - a rather condescending notion - wouldn't it also exacerbate the anger among those close to the perpetrator, who would then be serving a longer sentence because of things he said during the crime...
Under the current, limited hate-crimes laws, bias crimes have fallen. According to FBI figures, in 1995, there were 24 hate crimes based on race for every 1 million Americans; in 2006 - the most recent year for which data are available - there were 16. Anti-gay hate crimes have fallen from 5.2 per 1 million to 4.7 per 1 million - not a huge drop, but a statistically significant one. Would a broader hate-crimes law have reduced these figures even further? I doubt it. Even if a violent criminal knows that a tough hate-crimes law exists, wouldn't that...