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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31465 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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July 13 - The far-right parliamentary party Our Homeland Movement repainted the bench to the Hungarian national colors of red-white-green the same day. Apparently nobody actually guarded it.

Honestly getting a group of activists to guerrilla-repaint LGBT murals in local flag colors is such low hanging fruit I’m surprised no other Conservative Party has decided to do it.

Wouldn't that be a hate crime in most US states? Sounds like something you could do serious time for

Almost certainly not. A "hate crime" is a regular crime that is committed because of the status of the victim. There is really no victim here. If I vandalize a mosque or some such, that might be a hate crime. But as I understand it, this is a publicly owned bench.

There's been several cases where people did various things to rainbow road-crossing markers, and while some have found specifically that the state's or city's property could not be a valid target for hate crime purposes under existing law, this does seem to be a specific statutory thing.

Yes, part of the issue is that it has to be based on something more than the defendant's dislike, etc, of the group, because of R.A.V. v. City of St Paul:

As explained earlier, see supra, at 386, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul's comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty.

I am having trouble imagining how a statute would thread the needle such that painting a public bench to express disapproval of views would be punishable as a hate crime.

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