This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Osama bin Laden didn't have anything personal against the thousands of people he killed in the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93. He had no idea who each of them was and didn't care.
The whole point of the attacks of 9/11 wasn't to kill any particular person. It was to spread fear among all Americans, if not all of Western Civilization. Or don't you remember?
That's why they call it terrorism.
And that is the goal, if on a much smaller scale, of those who commit what are properly referred to as hate crimes.
Those are criminal acts where the aim of the criminal is much larger than just to damage the property, break the nose or end the life of one particular person. It is to lash out at every person who shares the race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation of the individual victim or victims. It is to spread fear far and wide.
That's what makes it a more serious crime. And what justifies a more severe punishment.
Utah state Sen. Steve Urquhart is carrying Senate Bill 107, a bill that would put some necessary teeth in the state's hate crimes law. The bill passed a Senate committee Thursday, over misguided objections that it might criminalize mere thought or violate constitutional rights of speech or association.
The act would do nothing of the sort.
SB107, if it becomes law, would only come into play when some other act that is clearly a crime — vandalism, assault, murder — has been committed. And then only if prosecutors could prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the crime was motivated by the perpetrator's dislike, not of the individual target, but of all who share particular traits.
If it was, that is, an act of terrorism.
The law would not create new criminal acts. It would simply increase the penalties for behaviors that are already, and clearly, crimes when those crimes can be shown to have been motivated by animus toward a particular group, a race, religion, sexual orientation, gender. Any race, religion, sexual orientation or gender.
That means that it does not only protect minorities. Targeting a white, male Mormon — when the perpetrator can be shown to be lashing out at all white, male Mormons — would qualify for the enhanced penalties laid out in SB107.
This is a bill that prosecutors say they need, that mirrors similar laws in other states and that does absolutely nothing to punish or delegitimize anyone's personal disapproval of, say, homosexuality, Islam or immigration.
Merely harboring hostility toward such groups would remain, as it always has been, something people can hide in the darkest reaches of their own hearts.
The law can't follow you there.