Echoes in Eternity

Hate-crime enhancements were added to charges against Salvador, which could mean a more severe sentence if he is convicted. Authorities say the woman was taunted for being a lesbian during the 45-minute assault.
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"The crimes that were committed at face value were shocking," Lt. Mark Gagan said. "But when it was revealed there was also a hate crime enhancement, it really prompted outcry."

So gang rape is now considered less wrong than taunting someone about their lifestyle choices? Apparently, in our Western society, it is more evil (or at least more noteworthy) to say or think a "prejudice" than to commit a vicious crime. To use a term of Stalin's, they are "engineering our souls." This reminds me of a short story in Dalrymple's essay "It's This Bad."

[A]n Oxford student who, slightly drunk after celebrating the end of his exams, approached a mounted policeman. “Excuse me,” said the young man to the policeman, “do you realize your horse is gay?”

This was not a very witty remark, but it was hardly filled with deep malice either. It was, perhaps, a manifestation of the youthful silliness of which most of us have been guilty in our time.
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The policeman did not think the student’s remark was innocent, however. He called two squad cars to his aid, and, in a city in which it is notoriously difficult to interest the police in so trivial a matter as robbery or burglary, they arrived almost at once. Apparently, the mounted policeman thought—if thought is quite the word I seek—that the young man’s remark was likely to “cause harassment, alarm or distress.” He was arrested and charged under the Public Order Act for having made a “homophobic remark.”

The young man spent a night in jail. Brought before the magistrates the following day, he was fined $140, which he refused to pay. The police then sent the case to the equivalent of the district attorney, who brought the student before the courts again but had to admit that there was not enough evidence to prove that his conduct had been disorderly.

The degree to which political correctness has addled British consciousness, like a computer virus, and destroyed all our traditional attachment to liberty, is illustrated by the words of one of the student’s friends who witnessed the incident. “[His] comments were . . . in jest,” he said. “It was very clear that they were not homophobic.” In other words, the friend accepted the premise that certain remarks, well short of incitement to commit violence or any actual crime—words that merely expressed an unpopular or intolerant point of view—would have constituted reasonable grounds for arrest. One consequence of the liberal intelligentsia’s long march through the institutions is the acceptance of the category of Thoughtcrime. On the other hand, political correctness permits genuine incitement to murder—such as the behead those who insult islam placards carried by Muslim demonstrators in London four months after the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper—to go completely unpunished. Other people, other customs.

It would seem that America is not far behind the Brits.