The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 3, reports:
Police on Friday arrested a man accused of spreading manure along the path of a gaypride parade last Sunday in Conway. . . . [The man is charged with harassment,] a Class A misdemeanor, carrying a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to a year in jail.
The Conway police, fire and street departments were compiling a list of cleanup costs and will ask City Attorney Mike Murphy to pursue restitution . . . .
On Sunday morning, parade organizers John Schenck and Robert Loyd said they found manure spread outside their house at 1605 Robinson Ave. and along the parade route. City workers cleaned the street before the parade began.
Police said a dump-truck load of manure was spread on the street about 6:30 a.m. . . . [Schenck] said the episode showed why Arkansas needed a “hate-crimes” law.
The FBI defines a hate crime as “a criminal offense committed against a person or property which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin.”
How does it show that? Manure Boy is rightly being charged with a crime — spreading manure on a public street is antisocial behavior that harms those nearby, whether paraders or not; you shouldn’t be allowed to do that, as political commentary or otherwise. It’s properly not a very serious crime, since spreading manure isn’t that harmful; a fine and a suspended sentence is likely the right penalty.
But in any event, should the law really treat differently manure spreading aimed at a gay pride parade at a St. Patrick Day’s Parade (since hate crimes laws would cover crimes motivated by the target’s race and ethnicity), but not manure spreading aimed at a Veterans of Foreign Wars parade or an anti-gay parade? (I assume that the spreader here was motivated by the gay pride paraders’ sexual orientation, and not just their views, but the spreader at the hypothetical anti-gay parade would likely be motivated by the anti-gay paraders’ political views, not their sexual orientation.)
I generally think that hate crimes laws are not unconstitutional (the Court got this right in Wisconsin v. Mitchell (1993)), though I think that they’re on balance a bad idea. But applying such laws to vandalism aimed at gay-affiliated political speech but not other political speech might indeed be unconstitutional; and even if it’s not unconstitutional, it is at least especially troubling.
Before the anti-homosexuality people start seizing on this as further evidence of those dominant gays trying to oppress the rest of us, let me mention that hate crimes laws were originally most seriously pushed by groups that see themselves as defending Jews and ethnic minorities. I think those laws are just as unjustified when applied to race, ethnicity, religion, or disability as they are when applied to sexual orientation. But here it looks like gay activists are just trying to get in on the same action that other groups have gotten in the past.
I’m aware that there are plausible arguments that crimes motivated by these factors are especially harmful or especially blameworthy — but I think that on balance those laws do more harm than good (see here for a brief summary of my views). And this incident is a good example of why the law should focus on the misconduct, not the anti-gay motivation behind the misconduct.
UPDATE: My original post erroneously referred to Schenck as the person who is charged with spreading the manure — my mistake; as the excerpt makes clear, he was the parade organizer and thus in a sense the victim, not the criminal. Very sorry; just typed the wrong name.
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