Friday, February 20, 2009

Battered Rihanna Photo: Hate Crime Evidence


Here's the sad and depressing and awful photo of Rihanna after low-life creep and alleged boyfriend Chris Brown beat the crap out of her face.

Did you know that "the crime of making criminal threats is punishable by up to nine years in prison," but beating up your girlfriend will get you only four years?

Presumably that's because criminal threats are made against people who matter, i.e., white men, Hispanic men, black men, homeless men, men who are murderers, men who are rapists.

The male constructed law in this country has a very long history of looking the other way whenever husbands and boyfriends beat the crap out of girlfriends and wives.

Expanding hate crime legislation to include violence against women, or gender is one way to finally begin to put a dent in the shameful tradition of men beating the crap out of women they allegedly care about, aka domestic violence.

Almost ten years ago, Carolyn Maloney observed:

It seems like a riddle Lewis Carroll could have posed in Alice in Wonderland - when is a hate crime not a hate crime? The answer is - when hate crime laws omit gender as one of the classifications for which prosecutors can seek a harsher sentence. Unfortunately, Federal legislation limits the category of hate crimes to race, religion and origin.

'Race, religion and national origin' . . . once again that's because the men, who dominate everything in this country, were thinking of themselves and their brothers when they wrote the laws explicitly biased in their favor.