Thought crimes

When news hit yesterday that a duo of University of Wisconsin students, along with two of their visiting friends from other schools, are facing hate crime charges over their alleged extensive harassment of a LGBT liaison in Ogg Hall, the campus community went into an uproar. On one side, some are rightfully outraged that such hateful activity would occur at the heart of UW. And on the other side, some are equally rightfully horrified that what roughly amounts to vandalism and harassment by most accounts is getting blown into the world of felonious crime and punishment.

Take a step back, for a second, though, and things get more interesting. This is the perfect storm by too many accounts.

To begin, this week, for UW, has been among the most viciously slow and boring of news cycles in a long time. When the athletic director is addressing the state legislature, you know that the holiday lull has somehow extended itself into mid-January.

Second, UW dorms and the question of speech restrictions have been alternating between the front and back burner of state news for a few months now. The Bible study ban is not an isolated issue; it is merely the anecdotal representation of a much larger issue. Suddenly people are talking about speech in public dorms and with the Regents' hand-appointed committee having just come back empty handed, the rhetoric on this subject is about to boil over like it did back in November.

And finally, this incident strikes. A poster gets torn down because the men portrayed as kissing on it were offensive to a drunken student. A white-erase board has some incendiary things written on it. And an LGBT liaison is verbally harassed to a terrible degree.

The Daily Cardinal came out with an excellent editorial today, jointly condemning the students who perpetrated this heinous act and the unjust laws with which they are now being charged:

It is our belief that hate crime laws like Wisconsin’s are in the wrong because they afford minority populations special, un-equal rights under the law, a clear infringment [sic] of the Fourteenth Amendment. The law must regard all citizens as equals. Moreover, hate crime statues shift the focus of a crime from intent to motive, thereby penalizing thought. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech and thought­—laws must not be enacted in an attempt to outlaw hate.

The UW campus is brewing for a scandal – after an autumn spent chatting about pedophiles, felons on the payroll and an administrator gone awry, people aren't about to accept no news as good news. The cause of two terrible poster children being prosecuted for what was allegedly in their heads may not be ideal, but it seems ripe for the activists to reach for their megaphones.

And, interestingly, this may be the first honest debate UW has seen in a while. This subject promises to not pit the right versus the left but, rather, to divide the left amongst itself. On one side will be the LGBT advocates hellbent on making an example out of these thuggish bigots; on the other side will be the free speech advocates determined to use Skokie-esque arguments to protect even the scum of UW from excessive prosecution.

As Brad over at Letters in Bottles wisely sums up:

This could be big. It might just open the "hate crimes" can of worms on campus and spur quite a conflagration of debate.