Hate Crimes.

• Author: Sullivan, Andrew
• Position: Brief Article

YES

Should there be special laws against them?

In the United States, for all its belief in equal rights, members of minority groups have often had to pay a terrible price just for being who they are. Its most compelling image has always been the black figure at the end of a lynch rope, hanging from a tree. But other groups-including homosexuals--have been victims of that murderous impulse too. Gradually, crimes motivated by hate have come to be seen as a category of their own.

Forty states have passed hate-crime laws, but 19 of those do not cover sexual orientation. Ten states, including Wyoming, have no hate-crime laws at all. There is no adequate federal standard of what constitutes a hate crime, and nothing could make plainer the need for one than the way young Matthew Shepard died in Wyoming in October 1998. By all reports, Shepard was befriended in a bar by two young men, then driven away to a lonely spot, tied to a fence, bashed in the head with something heavy, and left in almost freezing weather for 18 hours until he was found. He died soon afterward.

The men accused of killing Matthew Shepard are being tried for murder. But his death makes clear the need for hate-crime laws to protect those who survive and punish those who attack others, whether fatally or not, just because of who they are.

--EDITORIAL

The New York Times

NO

Why is hate for a group worse than hate for a person? In Laramie, Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard was brutally beaten to death, vicious murders are not unknown. In the previous 12 months, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found east of town with 17 stab wounds. In 1998, an 8-year-old Laramie girl was abducted, raped, and murdered, her...