Why Isn't Burning Baptist Churches a Hate Crime?

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe scolds the left regarding its lack of interest in the 10 church arson fires in Alabama, all of which occurred in Baptist churches. He points out some examples of situations that would have certainly gotten their attention:

SUPPOSE THAT in 2005 unknown hoodlums had firebombed 10 gay bookstores and bars in San Francisco, reducing several of them to smoking rubble. It takes no effort to imagine the alarm that would have spread through the Bay Area's gay community or the manhunt that would have been launched to find the attackers. The blasts would have been described everywhere as ''hate crimes," editorial pages would have thundered with condemnation, and public officials would have vowed to crack down on crimes against gays with unprecedented severity.

Suppose that vandals last month had attacked 10 Detroit-area mosques and halal restaurants, leaving behind shattered windows, wrecked furniture, and walls defaced with graffiti. The violence would be national front-page news. On blogs and talk radio, the horrifying outbreak of anti-Muslim bigotry would be Topic No. 1. Bills would be introduced in Congress to increase the penalties for violent ''hate crimes" -- no one would hesitate to call them by that term -- and millions of Americans would rally in solidarity with Detroit's Islamic community.

Each of these occurrence would quickly be declared a 'hate crime', and yet there's not such urgency in the case of the burning Baptist churches.

Ten arson attacks against 10 churches -- all of them Baptist, all in small Alabama towns, all in the space of eight days: If anything is a hate crime, obviously this is.

Or is it? ''We're looking to make sure this is not a hate crime and that we do everything that we need to do," FBI Special Agent Charles Regan told reporters in Birmingham. Make sure this is not a hate crime? If 10 Brooklyn synagogues went up in flames in a little over a week, wouldn't investigators start from the assumption that the arson was motivated by hatred of Jews? If 10 Cuban-American shops and restaurants in Miami were deliberately burned to the ground, wouldn't the obvious presumption be that anti-Cuban animus was involved?

Apparently Baptist churches are different.

''I don't see any evidence that these fires are hate crimes," Mark Potok, a director of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Los Angeles Times. ''Anti-Christian crimes are exceedingly rare in the South."

But are anti-Christian crimes really that rare? Or are they simply less interesting to the left, which prefers to cast Christians as victimizers, not victims?

A search of the SPLC's website, for example, turns up no references to Jay Scott Ballinger, a self-described Satan worshiper deeply hostile to Christianity, who was sentenced to life in prison for burning 26 churches between 1994 and 1999. Yet if those weren't ''hate crimes," what were they?

The reality is, most on the left wouldn't care if every Baptist church burned down, because they see Christians as the cause of evil, not a victim of it.

I personally don't like the idea of declaring certain acts 'hate crimes', when in reality, most every crime is a 'hate crime' of some sort. The guy that robs the liquor store hates the fact that he has no money and the store does. The same with the guy that burgles the home to steal other people's possessions. He hates the fact that they have them and he doesn't. Why aren't those 'hate crimes'?

The other obvious problem with declaring certain acts 'hate crimes' is that you're punishing people for what they think, or at least what you think they think. People should be free to think whatever they want, regardless of how despicable their thoughts may be to others. Only acts should be punished, not the thoughts that led up to the act. The victim is just as dead if he's killed in a liquor store robbery or killed because he was a guy wearing a dress. Punish the act.

We have 'hate crimes' because of political correctness. It's more politically incorrect to kill a guy because he's gay or black, than because he's a liquor store owner. Consequently we've created a system in which you can have two identical violations of the law (in this example murder), and yet one is considered 'worse' than the other. That's just idiotic.

Meanwhile, if we're going to continue having this nonsense called 'hate crimes', then the left has to drop its prejudices (or 'hate') against Christianity and pursue these church arsons with the same diligence they would pursue crimes against gays or racial groups.