The Hypocrisy of Hate-Crime Reporting

How many rural southern churches have to burn before any of the major news outlets report it as something serious and as a cause for concern? Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe gets to the nub of the problem (in my opinion) here.

SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no
effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay
community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers.
The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial
pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have
vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented severity.

Suppose that vandals last month had attacked 10 Detroit-area mosques and
halal restaurants, leaving behind shattered windows, wrecked furniture, and
walls defaced with graffiti. The violence would be national front-page news. On
blogs and talk radio, the horrifying outbreak of anti-Muslim bigotry would be
Topic No. 1. Bills would be introduced in Congress to increase the penalties for
violent ''hate crimes" -- no one would hesitate to call them by that term -- and
millions of Americans would rally in solidarity with Detroit's Islamic
community.

Fortunately, those sickening scenarios are only hypothetical. Here is one
that is not:

Ten arson attacks against 10 churches -- all of them Baptist, all in small
Alabama towns, all in the space of eight days: If anything is a hate crime,
obviously this is.

Or is it? ''We're looking to make sure this is not a hate crime and that we
do everything that we need to do," FBI Special Agent Charles Regantold reporters in Birmingham.
Make sure this is not a hate crime? If 10 Brooklyn synagogues went up in flames
in a little over a week, wouldn't investigators start from the assumption that
the arson was motivated by hatred of Jews? If 10 Cuban-American shops and
restaurants in Miami were deliberately burned to the ground, wouldn't the
obvious presumption be that anti-Cuban animus was involved?

Apparently Baptist churches are different.

Jacoby ends with this:

But real progress will come only when we abandon the whole misguided notion of ''hate crimes," which deems certain crimes more deserving of outrage and punishment not because of what the criminal did, but because of the group to which the victim belonged. The burning of a church is a hateful act regardless of the congregants' skin color. That some people bend over backward not to say so is a disgrace. (emphasis mine)

Amen!