A Poison in Society : Lancaster case exemplifies the moral horror of hate crimes

At 2:45 p.m. on Feb. 21, a yellow Chevrolet Malibu rolled past Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster. A crowd of students was leaving the school, heightening the potential for tragedy in what was to follow. Six gunshots erupted from the automobile, injuring all of the four African Americans (including a 1-year-old child) sitting in another car outside the school.

Because the three men arrested in this heinous act are members of a white supremacist group of skinheads, the case is being referred to as a race-related hate crime.

A cataloguing of hate crimes can establish trends and put authorities on the alert. Attaching the label of “hate crime” to a crime can also result in a stiffer prison sentence upon conviction of the defendant.

However, such terms as hate crime and gay-bashing are in some ways as weak as ethnic cleansing , a euphemism for horrid brutality and outright genocide. The term hatemonger can even bestow a certain status, a notoriety, on low-life criminals and hate group leaders.

When hate group members are inspected closely, they are seen to be dramatically ungifted and unsuccessful people who are looking for someone--Jews, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, those white folks or almost anyone else--to blame for their standing in life. The very crimes they commit expose their failure and moral bankruptcy. Organized hate is gutless people spray-painting synagogues or vandalizing cemeteries by night. It is burning a cross in a sleeping family’s yard. It is thugs ganging up on a solitary Latino.

It’s always best to describe perpetrators of these crimes as what they are: a burden to society best kept behind prison bars. The three Lancaster suspects are charged with attempted murder and child endangerment and are being held, collectively, on bonds totaling $3 million. Like all defendants in our system, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But the Feb. 21 attack, whoever did it, was totally unprovoked and seems to have targeted the victims solely on the basis of their race. Such a crime ranks high in the annals of evil and requires the law’s maximum punishment.