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dk--you see hate crime law as distorting equal protection because you see yourself as being without what you imagine these "extra protections" to be.
so in the end, the only thing holding your position together is a sense that, somehow, you are a victim here.
you route this through a strict construction framework perhaps intuitively, perhaps instrumentally--i don't know--but it doesn't change anything. you could say that strict construction has any traction at all anywhere as a function of the same sense of conservative victimization. go back to some imaginary good old days when categories like racism werent problems in the same way they've become since--not that there were no such problems--but they were "normal" so werent, you know, problems. they were just part of the fabric of things.
and to be clear, i wasn't at all equating conservatives and racism--quite the contrary--i was saying that as a possible line of defense in an argument against hate crime law, that the equation of the two was precluded, not only because it'd be rhetorically goofy, but more because for most conservatives, the equation isn't true.
what i was doing was tracking how it is that the opposition to hate crime laws as such got placed in such an odd position, made to operate in such an odd and to my mind self-defeating way. and the center of it is because it's not possible to say what the center of the actual problem seems to be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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