Are Hate Crime Enhancements Unjust in the United States?

What is a hate crime?
A hate crime is defined as "A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin."
(Definition provided by the FBI)

What a hate crime enhancement does is not only punish a perpetrator for the crime he committed but also adds more time due to the mentality behind the crime. My question to everyone is: Are these enhancements just? Should the assailant be not only sentenced due to the crime that he committed or should he also suffer a greater crime because his crime affected more people?First off I am going to show you the side which says that these enhancements are just, and then I will show you the side that says that these enhancements are illegal and should not be tolerated.

Some people say that hate crime enhancements are just, and the most used argument for this is the fact that it can be used as a deterrent for future offenders. Some people say that we need these enhancements to have a peaceful community, and that punishing someone for a crime is different because a hate crime is a heinous crime. People say that hate crimes cause a ripple effect in that they not only affect the individual, Sean Hannity writes " Hate crimes cause a ripple effect far beyond the injured person." What this means is that a hate crime not only affects the person that was "victimized" but also the entire community that shares in the common factor of the victim. There have been some advocates that say due to the fact that this crime affects more people then the sentence should be greater to match the magnitude of the people.

There have been some people that say that despite all the evidence hate crime enhancements are in fact unjust. There have been some people that say that if a crime is committed twice by two different people and the only difference is that one crime happened due to his personal belief then there should be no enhancements. They say that the people who advocate for the "equality and fairness" in society should realize that they are in fact weighing one crime over the other and that is in fact unjust to the family of the lesser sentenced perpetrator. With our society holding double standards all over the place (i.e. drugs vs alcohol, and "legal ages") why should we have a double standard in our "justice" system? People have said that under the Fifth Amendment no person can be punished twice for the same crime, and tat doing so would violate the double jeopardy clause.

So my question to you is what do you think about the hate crime enhancements? Should a person be punished for a greater crime against a greater number of people or should they not cause injustice for the victims of those whose crimes were not deemed "Hate Crimes."

Fahrenheit 451 v.s. Equilibrium

Fahrenheit 451: In a time and age when reading has been made illegal punishable by governmental arson against your house, Guy Montag, has challenged the laws. In this society firemen start the fires against the offenders instead of putting them out, they walk around with kerosene on their backs dousing houses in fire. Guy Montag starts out as a "fireman" who does his job exceedingly well until one day he meets Clarisse, a girl who reads. This girl questions why he chooses to burn books instead of read them, and to her surprise he tells her that he actually has never read a book before. This chain of events leads Mr. Montag to steal a book which causes him to run for his life from his fellow firemen. The firemen have this diabolical "search-and-destroy" machine, which is described as a metal hound with hypodermic needles as teeth with paralytic poison strong to kill a human, which they set upon Montag in order to bring him to "justice" under their laws.


Equilibrium: In this society all types of feeling and emotion are made to be illegal, as well as anything that provokes such emotions. Such offensive material include: Books, art, music, perfume/cologne, lamp shades, mirrors above certain heights and lengths, and bright colors. In order to preserve human life after WWIII these laws were put in place with the idea that if mankind cannot feel then they cannot incite wars, and they cannot commit crimes. The enforcement the society has are called the Tetragrammaton who have elite super-soldiers/assassins called Grammaton Clerics that search our and kill (in the movie they called it processing but in reality they cremate you alive) all the "sense-offenders".


Synthesis: Through both plot lines the governments both try to oppress any form of uprising by exterminating them, however all it takes is for one person to have the will-power to stand up and they can change history.

Joy Synthesis

"Joy is a personal feeling of great euphoria. It is a feeling of delight and happiness."
-Lucas

"My Definition of Joy - The feeling of complete happiness. The desire to do nothing else in the world except that one thing that makes all your fears, troubles, and worries disappear like the dark shadows of night when the sun comes up."
-Brian

Synthesis:
Joy is a individual feeling of ultimate satisfaction in which once the bliss occurs all the worries disappear like shadows in the sunlight.

What is Joy?

Boxing... 260lb VS. 140lb

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To me all that joy is is the feeling of being carefree. The freedom that you feel after you get out of school for the summer, the feeling of freedom after say being in church or being on vacation. The feeling of joy is the ability to not worry about anything and just live your life in the moment.

Gender Roles

In today's society they tell you not to walk but not to run. They tell you how to act and how to think, but what boundaries are the ones that dictate how macho we have to be? How feminine women should be? These boundaries are gender roles, and just like you see in these pictures it is apparent why today's vast majority of the population is confused about what to do, and afraid to like and do what they like to do. For men they tell us that we have to be
"built," but they also tell us that we have to eat "man-sized" meals to define ourselves. For women they tell them that they have to wear makeup in society but not too much makeup otherwise they look like "whores." Some people go around and say that they don't follow their gender roles, that they are "independent" but most of these gender roles are subconscious. Ask yourself, why is it that whenever you see a sidewalk you choose to walk on it instead of making your own path? It is the subconscious form of control that dictates how you act in society. Now instead of "doing your own thing" you now have forms of control that tell you where to go and when, and just like the sidewalk example we all fall into what society tells us to do. Gender roles in today's society tell us what we need and are supposed to act like, dress like, and even think like. In order to be a man in today's society we need to be strong, we need to be tough, and we need to defend our masculinity at all costs. In order to be a female in today's society you need to be dainty, and submissive. You can see every kind of reinforcing these stereotypes by just looking at what we watch and read (Sex in the City, Motor Cross, Vogue) and even in the toys and games that our children enjoy (Baseball, Ballet, GI Joe, Barbie). Guys today constantly insult each other by calling them "fags" if they like one movie or the other. Our society has bastardized its "gender roles" even to the point where in a few cases defendants have gotten away with murder because the victim was gay and they were just "defending their masculinity." Even in our rhetoric we see today in the entertainment industry we label movies as "chick flicks." So my only thing to add to this is the next time you see a person, think about them, then think about the label you just gave them. Don't try to say you don't label people because everyone label's people, whether it be straight, gay, retro, bi, fat, skinny, hot, sexy, or even cute everybody labels.

President Bush's Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People

In President Bush's Address to the nation after the tragedy of 9/11 you can see that he has promised more then he can deliver(which should come as no surprise for a politician). You can see that he used most of his speech directed at "tugging at our heart strings" then actually telling us any useful information. In his speech he told us that he was going to fight terrorism to the ends of the earth and that the attack would be relentless but what he didn't tell us he was going to do was to bankrupt our economy. YES, a few thousand did die in the twin towers but due to his actions and his apparent wasting of money he has now made tens of thousands of other Americans unable to afford a home let alone food and water, but you can't forget he still hasn't been able to solve for the original Americans that he lead his own personal vendetta against. In his speech he tells stories of courageous passengers who rushed terrorists and of a police officer who died to save others but what did those stories really accomplish? They accomplished absolutely nothing but making us say "hell yea let's go get those terrorist bastards." He keeps saying words like "My fellow Citizens" as well as "our" and "us" to make us sound like he is one of us but if that is the case then why did he not listen to us when we told him to stop this war on terror...or was it a war for oil? I get confused sometimes. Have you realized that the name of this war has changed many times? Going from a War for Freedom, to a War on Terror, and now the unofficial War for Oil, I don't know about you but sometimes I get confused with our president. Along with his statements if you paid attention to the Hurricane Katrina incident you would realize that the president used the same phrases to rally support for his regime in that case as well. What of New Orleans now a days though? It is as bad as it was when it first happened, only now gangs have moved in and taken control of the area and our President has neglected to do ANYTHING to help these people what so ever.

HELP! The Advertisements have eaten my brain!!!

This is what American Mentality has come down to today. It does not matter what type of product you have, as long as you believe the advertising then all they have to do is provide you with the means of obtaining this. Everyone knows(or should know) that what restaurants like McDonald's do is hire a professional chef to cook the food then then add about 3 pounds of chemicals to it to make it look good then photograph it. But what you must realize is that just like the burger in this picture most advertisements are false and lead up to an utter disappointment. If you have been in a restaurant like this then you see that most of the fast food places hold their food in a heated storage compartment for hours at a time. I have a friend that has worked at McDonalds before and she told me that the burgers there are actually engineered to stay "edible"(which we all know is barely anyways) for up to 18 hours at a time. So much for a fresh McDonalds burger huh? What you see in advertisements are designed to trick you, to literally suck every dime they can out of you. I mean look at the Coke-Cola product Dasani, the commercials are to lead you to believe that the water is pure and the most refreshing thing you have ever had(besides Sierra Mist of course) but in reality that water that they use comes from a privatized water sources out of third world countries. The average bottle of water costs what? $1-$1.50? Corporations such as this lead us to believe that the water only costs us pocket change. But what about the people in those countries? Those people work for a whopping 35cents an hour. Which means that they work 3 hours a day just to afford the water to live, that IS NOT including food, that IS assuming that their family's kids are old enough to work. If the kids are not old enough to work then they either die or get malnourished from the lack of food. So my challenge to the world is that before you go out and buy those objects that you don't really need but that the media has told you that you need ask yourself, is it really worth it? Is your unnecessary bottle of water worth the lives of these kids and families? Is that extra big mac going to make you feel wholesome while you know that hundreds of thousands of people around the world are starving? A little last fact for the day: Did you know that the US is one of the very few countries in the world in which people die of overeating while people around the world die of starving. Just think about that while you go eat until you are "full".

Shitty First Drafts -Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott's essay on how basically shitty one's first draft is is grossly over generalized. First of all she assumes that most people have all of these "voices" in their head telling them that what they are doing is wrong and that they "suck." MY style of writing is that I write the way that I talk. I always lived under the impression that if you tried to make the whole world happy you in fact would just make everyone upset, so when she assumes that before we all start writing we need to silence the voices but not all of us have voices. When it comes to the question of is my writing quick and sloppy or long and tedious my answer is neither, I think about what I write before I type it so that I won't waste time so my writing is faster paced then normal but clear at the same time. Granted sometimes my essay's are a bit lengthy but overall they are concise. I tend to write what I only mean to write so that means that I do not normally hugely revise my papers only small quick fixes otherwise I get carried away and I tend to not be able to stop. My feelings about writing are neither love nor loathing but rather if I must write something then I will no hate, no love. I personally think that the only thing that blogging may do to affect my writing is that my pace of typing will dramatically increase, I mean I'm not a slow typer but I would like to increase if possible.