When Hate Thwarts Potential, We All Lose

Lurking in communities throughout California and the United States is a dangerous obstacle that keeps Americans from reaching their full potential. That obstacle, just as deadly as the iceberg that broke apart the Titanic, is hate.

More than half a century ago, the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery described Polish children whose golden potential was truncated by the privations of ethnic and political strife in prewar Europe as “Mozart assassinated.”

This is likewise an apt description today of the loss we suffer when the possibilities of one of us are cut off by attacks of hate. When human potential is thwarted by persons who denigrate others because of their race, religion, ancestry, gender, disability or sexual orientation, we are all the victims.

In 1998, I first authored anti-hate crime legislation to raise the penalty to life in prison without parole for committing a hate-motivated murder because of gender, sexual orientation or disability. At the time, the shocking killings of Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder this summer in Redding, of Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama earlier this year, the torture and slaying of Mathew Shepard last year, allegedly on account of their sexual orientation, had not occurred. I authored the measure to ensure that the minimum penalty for this type of murder was as strong as the minimum penalty for other hate-based murders.

Life without parole already is the minimum punishment for deliberate and premeditated murders committed because of a person’s race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin, but a lesser penalty of 25 years in prison is applicable to murders based on gender, sexual orientation or disability. The legislation is awaiting action by Gov. Gray Davis.

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Never did it seem possible or even thinkable that during the course of this bill’s journey through the state Legislature, we would be struck in our own backyard by a hate-motivated attack against Jewish children at a day-care center in the San Fernando Valley. None of us will ever forget the terrifying television footage of those innocent children as victims. And now, no longer do my colleagues in Sacramento ask me, as they did a year ago, if strong legislation against hate crimes is truly needed.

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We must speak out and speak up for groups that are hunted down and targeted, and make clear as a society that we will stand up for them. The kind of thinking that leads someone to commit crimes against persons because they are lesbian, gay, because they are men or because they are women, or because a person has a disability, may be hidden.

But, like the unseen iceberg, such thinking is no less dangerous. It cuts the thinker off from society and it cuts groups off--not because of their character but because of characteristics that are arguably innate and unchangeable. It creates an us-versus-them mentality and a sense of superiority and inferiority.

No law alone will solve the problem of hate-based attacks. Our society is in a time of transition from one that has been forced to simply accept diversity to one that embraces and celebrates it as well.

We must expose hate crimes and the organizations that condone them, and most importantly, reject this aberrant behavior as unacceptable in a civilized culture.

Our security as individuals and as a people is inextricably linked to making this transition a success.