OPINION

OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: More about 'hate crimes'

You are free to think your own thoughts.

You can have dark fantasies and secret desires. You can believe what you want to believe. No one can stop you. No one cares.

But there is a world outside your head that carries on, indifferent to your plans and wishes, a society where minds and hearts might connect, where there are consequences to every action, to every expression of thought. Think of it as an arena or a marketplace, with rules and conventions and lubricating hypocrisies. This is the real world, son.

This is where you will be judged, where your viability as a member of the community--your worth as a person--will be constantly evaluated. Others will believe they know you based not only on what you do, but on how you present yourself and what you say.

Maybe you should think about that before you have "Blut und Ehre" tattooed on your neck. Maybe you should think about that before you order that Camp Auschwitz hoodie, even if you're only doing it for the ironic grins.

I used to think that motivations don't matter all that much when it comes down to the sharp end of the law. It's not that reasons why crimes are committed aren't important, it's just that I worried about the criminalization of thought. A broken window is a broken window no matter why a guy throws the brick; it's dangerous to give the government license to speculate about the offender's state of mind.

Because we're all allowed to think what we think.

Not too long ago I wrote that courts ought to consider only the offense committed, because it is often to ascertain the motives of suspects. I now think I was wrong about that, and that "why?" is almost always the most important question we can ask about a broken window or a murder.

After all, we already consider mitigating circumstances. And we should; let's allow those accused to defend themselves in any way they see fit. A diminished capacity or a good reason ought to be taken into account by the law. Crimes are not committed in a vacuum. Context is important.

Some of the people who wandered into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 probably didn't have murderous intent and may have been more curious than malicious. They still broke the law, but not in the same manner as those carrying weapons and nylon cuff restraints.

And hateful graffiti is not the same as bored and stupid graffiti, which is not the same as genuinely artful graffiti. We ought to be smart enough to tell the difference. It's not fair to treat all these offenders the same.

When someone tells you what they are, you should consider it as evidence. We're all adults here, and most of us can parse the dog whistles and winks and fist pumps. We know when a preacher or a politician is straining to preserve a sliver of plausible deniability. We know what Henry II was getting at when he whined about no one ridding him of that turbulent priest; he was signaling his base, inciting the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Why did those hippies kill Sharon Tate and all those others? Because some squirrelly little would-be singer-songwriter told them they would touch off a race war that would annihilate the established order. They'd hide out in the mountains for a while before coming down to claim their kingdom.

They thought the Storm was coming too. Chuck probably told them some Kraken equivalent was about to be unleashed. After all, he had the Beatles on his side.

But it's too easy to put it all down to mental illness; all of us have little quirks, but the bigger problem is that we're too lazy to try to figure things out for ourselves.

We like it when somebody tells us that we're smarter and more important than the world seems to be giving us credit for being. We like it when someone says our problems are not of our own making but part of the design of some evil cabal that seeks to hold us down while exalting those less worthy. We like it when someone tells us we're naturally superior to people of different ethnicities and cultures.

Because maybe, secretly, that's one of the things we mull over when we're thinking those long private thoughts we are free to think. Because it's hard for some of us not to believe in our own specialness. Because some of us mistake the nattering voice in our heads for supernatural imperative.

So I'm OK with considering the reasons why someone breaks the law.

Stealing bread because you're hungry is different than stealing bread because you want to cut into the profit margins of an immigrant shopkeeper. We can use our intelligence to investigate and discover facts that tend to support theories about what happened. Certainly there are things we cannot know beyond a reasonable doubt, but there are a lot more things we can feel confident in saying.

Racists should not feel emboldened; they should feel censured. That they have a right to think their own thoughts does not mean they have a right to express those thoughts without risking backlash. The First Amendment doesn't give anyone a right to publish, or immunize anyone from facing social and commercial consequences for their actions.

You can't be put in jail for voicing an opinion. But you can lose your job and your Twitter followers for it.

You don't want to be labeled a racist? Don't do or say racist things. A good rule of thumb is that if you're at a protest and the Nazis (or people cos-playing as Nazis) are on your side, you're probably on the wrong side. Of history, if not the actual law.

We ought to start considering why people do the bad things they do, and use all of our competence and intelligence to combat hatefulness. We may never eradicate it, but we can acknowledge that it compounds and aggravates actions, and that we can and do recognize it.

You can think what you want. You can say what you want. But the world watches and will judge.

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