In the United States, Hate-Crime enhancements are unjust.

The current LD resolution. Come one, come all, and debate me! Because hate crime enhancements violate free speech, I affirm the resolution, Resolved: Hate crime enhancements are unjust in the United States. The United States Sentencing Guidelines 3A1.1.(a) currently sets down hate crime enhancements as occurring when: "The defendant intentionally [selecting] any victim or any property as the object of the offense of conviction because of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person." The resolution specifically questions whether a certain policy is just or unjust, and therefore the most appropriate value for this round is Justice, defined by Merriam-Webster as the "maintenance or administration of what is merited especially by impartial adjustments." The maintenance and administration of justice, in the context of the resolution, requires that law objectively give people what they are due. If the law or legislation does not meet this requirement, the law or legislation can legitimately be called unjust. Consequently, the thesis of the affirmative is that hate crime enhancements are unjust because they violate the fundamental human right to freedom of thought and opinion. Therefore, the sufficient value criterion to affirm is comprised of two interrelated burdens. The affirmative must demonstrate that: 1) The action of punishing and suppressing freedom of speech and thought is unjust, and 2) Hate crime enhancements punish and suppress freedom of speech and thought. Meeting this dual burden of proof would meet the semantic and logical conditions that would make the resolution a true statement, and would thus mandate an affirmative ballot. My first justification establishes that a law suppressing or punishing freedom of speech and thought is an unjust and formidable evil. Freedom of speech is a universal ideal held as a standard for the respect of human dignity, and is ingrained in both the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As John Stewart Mill expresses, "Not the violent conflict between each side, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope, when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood... Though the silenced opinion may be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. " The reasoning behind this argument is simple. While a suppression of an idea will never allow its errors to be revealed, the expression of the idea will allow for ‘collision of adverse opinions' from which the truth can be seen. If the silenced opinion is without a forum in which to challenge other ideas, those ideas will harden into prejudices and falsehoods. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis also demonstrates the reasoning that repression of ideas leads to hazard rather than safety: "[Those who won our independence] knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones. Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form." Silence coerced by law is a ‘formidable evil' and suppression of thought through law has dire consequences to stable government and society. Therefore, punishing freedom of speech would be unjust. My second justification is that hate crime enhancements punish and violate freedom of speech and thought. As Jacob Sullum expresses, "Hate crime laws, by their very nature, punish people for their opinions. A mugger who robs a Jew because he's well-dressed is punished less severely than a mugger who robs a Jew based on the belief that Jews get their money only by cheating Christians. A thug who beats an old lady in a wheelchair just for fun is punished less severely than a thug who does so because he believes disabled people are leeches." By punishing certain beliefs but not others, the government is effectively saying that some ideas are bad and wrong. Regardless of whether an idea is ridiculous, disgusting, or offensive in anway way, it is not the role of the government to tell those who believe in it that it is wrong. So what is it that the government is punishing if it enhances the sentence to a certain crime? If it is the supposed extra harms that stem from hate crimes compared to their normal parallel crimes, there is already an allocated amount of punishment for the crime itself, and even without hate crime enhancement, the perpetrator would be punished for the severity of the crime. Judges use discretion in all cases to "take a crime's impact into account at sentencing." (Sullum, Jacob), and as such the punishment for the crime itself is already taken care of regardless of the enhancement. Thus, the additional punishment is actually punishment for the opinion and thoughts of the perpetrator. As Daniel E. Troy states in a Testimony for the House Judiciary Committee, hate crime enhancements advocate punishment for holding opinions that the government disagrees with, and to reach the goal of justice, the rights of free speech and opinion ought to be protected: "Hate crime legislation punishes people for the content of their ideas. Of course, these ideas are noxious and repulsive to the vast majority of the population -- and well they should be. However, the level of disgust harbored by the masses for an idea has never been legitimate criteria for allocating punishment. As Justice Robert Jackson said in his 1943 Barnette decision: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."45 Justice Jackson's eloquent words apply equally to protect flag burners, Jehovah's Witnesses, and even racists." The argument of the affirmative, then, can be summarized easily as a simple syllogism: violations of freedom of speech and thought are unjust, and hate crime enhancements inherently violate freedom of speech and thought. As a result, hate crime enhancements are unjust and the resolution is true. As Thomas Jefferson concludes, "We have nothing to fear from the demoralizing reasonings of some, if others are left free to demonstrate their errors and especially when the law stands ready to punish the first criminal act produced by the false reasonings." Indeed, it is the crime that should be punished, not the opinions and beliefs behind the act. For these reasons, I urge an affirmative ballot.