[Tishabet]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

Any crime in which an adult victimizes a kid should be punished more harshly, preferably by death or castration. People who victimize kids are never cured or rehabilitated. They need to be permanently shut down. Best would be to let the victim's dad have some alone time with the perp.

Rick,
for the record, I'm actually on your side of this debate. That being said, can't the devil's advocate side of me restate your quote to be

"Any crime in which a person victimizes another person based on their race/gender/orientation/etc should be punished more harshly, preferably by death or castration. People who victimize other people based on their race/gender/orientation/etc are never cured or rehabilitated. They need to be permanently shut down."

I know I'm just stirring the pot here... in all honesty, I have internally inconsistent views with this stuff which I am trying to reconcile. I think hate crime laws are wrong because they arbitrarily add "weight" to a crime based solely on some relationship between the perp and the victim, which seems tertiary to the issue of the crime. Yet the same could be said of the "relationship" between adult and child (or citizen and police officer) and in those cases my gut says the relation ought to have "weight" and the perp deserves extra punishment.