I was in DC for a conference and picked up the Washington Post. When I got to the op-ed page, I noticed a column, The Folly of Hate-Crime Laws, by Richard Cohen, which reminded me of why I drastically cut back on my consumption of newspaper op-eds a couple of decades ago.
The column as a whole is reasonable enough, if commonplace–Cohen is making the argument that there’s no reason to specially punish hate crimes, it should be enough to punish the crime itself. I have no problem with this argument (and do not pretend to have the legal knowledge to evaluate it). But I do have a problem with Cohen’s conclusion, which is that charging James von Brunn (the guy who recently shot up somebody at the Holocaust Museum) with a hate crime “ghettoizes both its real and purported victims. It’s a consequence that von Brunn himself might applaud.”
Huh? Maybe it’s time for a jailhouse interview. Cohen is a reporter, right? Short of that, I’d say it’s safe to assume that, no, von Brunn would not “applaud” hate crimes laws. The burden of proof is on whoever would claim differently, no?
I think the problem with this sort of column is that the columnist typically has to choose between a few options: (a) moral indignation, (b) bemused detachment, (c) a delightfully paradoxical twist, . . . Cohen went for (c). But, as we all know, it’s easier to be counterintuitive and wrong than counterintuitive and right.
As Cohen puts it, “Slippery slopes are supposedly all around us, I know, but this one is the real McCoy.”
Connection to loss aversion
I actually remember Richard Cohen’s name from when I was reading the Post thirty years ago. Maybe it’s time for him to retire. But I can see how this might not happen. If you yank Cohen and replace him with somebody new, you’ll make some readers happy and antagonize others. But, loss aversion being what it is, it’s likely that the negative reader reaction would outweigh the positive. So he stays in.