7/20/00 4:45 p.m.
The Post Shills for “Hate Crimes”
Human motivation is complex.

By Matthew Feeney

ou know from the caption that he was beaten to death. So the picture of the sweet-faced young black man on the front page of Thursday's Washington Post is enough to make you cry. But this murder happened in Grant Town, West Virginia, two weeks ago. Why is it on the front page of a paper published in a city where people are murdered every day? Because certain "residents and activists...are convinced that J.R. Warren was killed because he was black, or gay, or both." The Post, however, virtually ignores a potentially crucial aspect of the case in order to tell its "hate crimes" story.

Tracey A. Reeves reports the story with the proper mix of liberal suspicion and liberal credulity. She brushes past the details of the murder, in which two teenage boys apparently kicked and beat Warren to death and then ran his body over several times to make it look like a hit and run. In fact, she appears to have done no reporting at all about the suspects, their backgrounds, their previous run-ins with the law. She is in a hurry to get to the real story, which is race, or sexual preference. Or both.

Grant Town is a poor little burg with a small black population, but people seem to get along pretty well here. Or do they? One white man notes that he has plenty of black friends, but they never talk about race. A black woman notes that someone once called her the "N word right to my face." She continues, "Is racism here? You bet." So, J.R. was murdered because he was black.

But, in a section entitled "Struggling to Fit In," Reeves conveys the sense of threat that a frightfully skinny (5'10", 125-pound) young gay man like J.R. must have felt in an Appalachian backwater like Grant Town. (Coming from a small rural town myself, it's painful for me even to recall the efforts of gay teenagers to fit in, or simply to avoid getting beaten up.) To top it off, he had recently been teased for being gay. So, he was murdered because he was gay.

However, the next section is entitled "Acquainted With Suspects" and mentions, in passing, that "some local media have reported that Warren was killed because he wanted to go public with a sexual relationship he claimed to have had with at least one of the suspects." Indeed, one police officer admits that there is evidence to substantiate this suggestion, but he hasn't seen it yet. Neither, apparently, has Reeves, because she pursues this extremely relevant possibility . . . barely past the end of the sentence in which she raises it. Instead, she quickly turns to the activists who have converged on Grant Town seeking to make J.R. another martyr in the crusade for hate-crimes legislation.

Her final section is entitled "'What Hate Does.'" The inside headline, looming over the tiny, lurid details about the possibility that a gay man was murdered by two gay teenagers is, "W.Va. Town Confronts Hate When Gay Black Man Slain."

The fact that Reeves virtually ignores a startling complication in her hate-crimes narrative, and turns to a final discussion of activists' attempts to incorporate sexual preference in hate-crimes legislation, pretty much gives the game away: Reeves is not out to get to the bottom of a hideous murder. She's allowing activists for hate-crimes laws to use her, and J.R. Warren, as agit-props.

The implication of stories like this is always that those who oppose hate-crimes laws are pretty much at the same level as those who commit the crimes. They adhere to a formula: a gay man's murder, intimations of prejudice, and uncritical interviews with hate-crimes activists.

More disturbing is the use of the word "hate" as if it were merely descriptive, like "angry" or "Mercedes." Rather, "hate" functions at different times as therapy and propaganda. It is therapy for people seeking to express outrage at acts of violence that hit them very close to home. It is propaganda in that it rises hotly from one side in a live political debate. It conveys an argument, not fact.

Despite Reeves's obvious complicity in this charade, political bias in these stories comes more from editors than reporters. If there were an epidemic of hate crimes, then the Post wouldn't have had to resurrect a two-week-old story from a different state in order to keep the issue alive on its front page. The U.S. is a big, violent country. It would be possible for a determined national-desk editor to suggest an epidemic of men-killing-their-childrens'-baby-sitters-whom-they're-having-affairs-with-who-are threatening-to-spill-the-beans-to-the-men's-wives, and, through a diligent culling of nationwide police logs, and a judicious spacing of in-depth articles on the handful of murders that fit the profile, to keep the epidemic angle alive indefinitely. In placing this story on the front page, the Post's editors are clearly making a political choice.

In doing so, they are robbing the-hate crimes legislation debate of its complexity. Hate-crimes laws are in large measure motivated by a desire to designate a protected set of victims, and as such they are an insult to victims of more prosaic types of violent crime. Further, they tend to punish a certain class of proscribed thoughts, and as such they represent yet another wound to freedom of speech and thought inflicted by political correctness.

But, perhaps unintentionally, hate-crime laws sometimes identify a truly special class of perpetrators. It is not that they murder and maim out of "hate" that makes them special, though. It is that they do so for pleasure. Dragging James Byrd behind the pickup truck they were driving, John King and James Brewer were having a good ol' time. Likewise, the two West Virginia boys who kicked and beat J.R. Warren to death, if they really did it because he was gay, were most likely wallowing in the sick pleasure of righteous power. Not only did Warren's physical frailty empower them to do it, his homosexuality meant that he deserved it. A crime in which the victim is consciously picked out because of his race or sexual preference most likely involves this extra, and extra-loathsome, dimension: visceral pleasure, perhaps deriving from a sort of moral certainty, in the violence one is perpetrating.

However, it is also very easy for prosecutors to convey this aspect of a crime to a jury, which can then apply the knowledge during sentencing. Byrd's killers may have received the death penalty if, say, their victim was a white guy they shot in a robbery. But, even without a hate-crime law, the "hate" dimension of the Byrd murder made the death penalty an easy sell for prosecutors, even for an east Texas jury. It will probably have the same effect when the two little scumbags who kicked and beat J.R. Warren to death are brought to trial, even without a hate-crimes law, even in Grant Town, West Virginia.