"What’s So Bad about Hate" by Andrew Sullivan, in The New York Times Magazine (Sept. 26, 1999), 229 W. 43rd St., New York, N.Y. 10036.

There’s much talk these days about "hate crimes," that is, crimes committed out of hatred for the victim because he or she is a homosexual or in some other way "different." Many favor laws prescribing special punishments in such cases. This makes little sense, argues Sullivan, the gay author of Virtually Normal (1995) and a New York Times Magazine contributing writer.

Hatred, he argues, is a very vague concept— "far less nuanced an idea than prejudice, or bigotry, or bias, or anger, or even mere aversion to others. Is it to stand in for all these varieties of human experience—and everything in between? If so, then the war against it will be so vast as to be quixotic." And if hate instead is restricted to "a very specific idea or belief, or set of beliefs, with a very specific object or group of objects," then the antihate war will "almost certainly" be unconstitutional.

Proponents of hate crime laws usually have "sexism," "racism," "anti-Semitism," and "homophobia" in mind as the varieties of hate that should win criminals extra punishment. But these advocates’ implicit neat division between "oppressors" and blameless "victims" is simplistic, Sullivan says, and "can generate its own form of bias" against particular groups, such as "white straight males." This approach, like hate, "hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity." It also ignores the fact that "hate criminals may often be members of hated groups." According to FBI statistics, for instance, blacks in the 1990s were three times as likely as whites to commit "hate crimes." And, writes Sullian, "It’s no secret... that some of the most vicious anti-Semites in America are black, and that some of the most virulent anti-Catholic bigots in America are gay."

"Why is hate for a group worse than hate for a person?" Sullivan asks. Was the brutal murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998 worse than the abduction, rape, and murder of an eight-year-old Laramie girl by a pedophile that same year? Proponents of hate crime laws argue that such crimes spread fear beyond the immediate circles of the victims. But all crimes do that, Sullivan says.

Proponents also claim there has been an "epidemic" of hate crimes in recent years, but FBI statistics, he notes, do not bear that out. In 1992, there were 6,623 "hate crime" incidents reported by 6,181 agencies, covering 51 percent of the population; in 1996, 8,734 incidents reported by 11,355 agencies, covering 84 percent of the population. Moreover, most of the incidents involved not violent, physical assaults on people, but crimes against property or "intimidation." Of the 8,049 hate crimes reported in 1997, only eight were murders.

"The truth is," Sullivan says, "the distinction between a crime filled with personal hate and a crime filled with group hate is an essentially arbitrary one." The government should fight crime, he concludes, but not pursue the utopian goal of eliminating hate from human consciousness. "The boundaries between hate and prejudice and between prejudice and opinion and between opinion and truth are so complicated and blurred that any attempt to construct legal and political fire walls is a doomed and illiberal venture."