Should Hate Crime Defendants Against Gays Be Allowed To Get Off Without Having Homosexual Sex?

Jacob Sullum asks, can lesbians commit an anti-gay hate crime?

I didn’t have time to read the comments there (skimmed, mostly) but I think we can all agree that the answer is obviously not. A lesbian is of person-type {Gay} and a Hate Crime, by definition, is (and only is) a crime committed by person-type {X} against a person of person-type {Y} due to Person-Type Hatred for members of {Y}. It has to do with power asymmetry and intrinsic power structures among the mutually-disjoint but overlapping partitions of Person Types into which all of Humanity naturally and strictly decomposes. At least, if I am remembering my college freshman orientation accurately (as you can see I have mentally encoded all this into its equivalent quasi mathematical notation for ease of recall, strengthening my confidence that I’m remembering it correctly). Now admittedly there’s a problem with my trying to remember those all-important lessons gleaned from college freshman orientation which is that those memories are all mixed up with various dramas and embarrassments that I guess must have all occurred around the same time, hazily-remembered (or in some cases, suppressed) things such as a fateful game of Secret Santa, an infamous dare involving the eating of unorthodox mixtures of cafeteria food, the vomiting of same, etc., but I’m pretty sure I’ve got basically right.

In any event, it seems to follow quite incontrovertibly from orthodox lefty Smart People rhetoric that a lesbian cannot possibly, even in principle, be guilty of a Hate Crime against a gay person. Robbery, assault, murder, cannibalism – perhaps. But such an extreme offense as a Hate Crime? Surely not.

This fact is problematic if it becomes widely known, by the way; in a way it is irresponsible for Jacob Sullum to even have publicized the question. After all, it opens the possibility that someone accused of a Hate Crime against a Gay person could falsely claim to be Gay him/herself and thereby get off scot-free for the Hate Crime (!), only enduring whatever punishment/prison time accrues to the underlying crime itself. This is obviously an intolerable and potentially disastrous loophole in our Hate Crime legal/philosophical framework. Clearly care thus must be taken to ensure that such legal defense claims of Being Gay are not accepted by the Court willy nilly, merely on the say-so of the defendant; that way lies chaos.

The only logical solution, then, is that the Court in such cases must establish a legal framework whereby Hate Crime defendants can, as & when needed, objectively and legally prove their Gay status to the satisfaction of The People, and so that fraudulent claims of Gayness can be easily weeded out. Since (unfortunately!) (?) there is no genetic test for the irrefutably-inborn quality of Gayness, and certainly no other visual or cultural or lisp-based test, obviously the only judiciably-acceptable test for Gayness a Court could possibly implement would have to involve direct evidence of the homosexual act.

The Court could for example set up secure, comfortable, romantic hideaways in which Hate Crime defendants claiming to be Gay could prove it by engaging in homosexual acts with suitable Court officers under strict Court observation, say behind a one-way mirror or closed-circuit television. Alternatively, although less desirably, previously-created visual recordings of such acts (of sufficiently-high definition and quality) could be entered into evidence and viewed in court, in lieu of the (preferable) Court-mandated homosexual sex.

Obviously some details would have to be worked out. For example, would having sex just one time, with one person of the same sex, really prove a person Gay? Presumably the Court would have to work out some minimum number of acts and partners to truly establish Gayness beyond dispute. We wouldn’t want Heterosexual defendants to be holding their nose and engaging in one-time homosexual acts just to get out of Hate Crime raps. We’d want to be sure the defendant wanted and enjoyed the homosexual act before dropping charges. I don’t know if a system of brain scan monitoring, electrodes or other means of enjoyment discovery could be worked out; that is a question for the scientists, and likely to be a fruitful research area deserving of Federal funding in the years to come.