"Hate crime laws will change society for the better."

Some federal laws that ran ahead of prevailing opinion have ended up creating a positive change in our society at large. The civil rights laws that overturned the "separate but equal" falsehood are a great example. But hate crimes legislation will not have such beneficial effect. For one thing, hate crime laws may be unconstitutional. They propose to punish some assaults-those committed in the context of a certain sort of speech-more severely than other, otherwise similar, assaults. In essence then, the two assaults will be punished identically and a further penalty will be added as punishment for the speech itself. That is patently against the 1st amendment. As much as we need protection against hate crimes, we must remain clear-sighted about how we obtain it. Hate is not prosecutable; crime is.

Even without the constitutionality question, hate crime laws are a bad idea. A look at the Jewish experience in the Diaspora may be instructive. We all know how dangerous living in urban ghettos in Europe proved to be. When those ghettos were built, they were specially protected, favored neighborhoods. They were inducements for Jewish communities to move into those cities that had ghettos. No one at the beginning of that history could have anticipated how things ended up. Particular protection became, in the course of time, a ready-made means of persecution.

The real insidiousness of hate crime laws is that they lull us into depending on them. Just as relying on police protection isn't working, neither will relying on protection through the courts. The only real defense against immediate aggression is immediate self-defense.