Dime a dozen.
Stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions are a dime a dozen - but in cases like that of Lawrence King, they can be quite costly. King, aged 15, was shot Tuesday by one of his classmates while at school in Southern California. His shooter, aged 14, has been charged with a hate crime for undisclosed reasons - but other students say that King was rumored to be gay, and there was bad blood between the two students.
Murder, Hate Crime Charges Filed in Southern California School Shooting - Advocate.com
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 14-year-old boy with attempted murder and said he committed a hate crime in the classroom shooting of an eighth-grader who was declared brain dead.
Prosecutors would not say why they filed a hate-crime enhancement with the attempted murder count, but [...] ”It is inevitable that this is going to become a murder case,” Ventura County prosecutor Maeve Fox said.
King was shot in the head Tuesday morning during a class at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, police said. More than 20 other students were in the room at the time. [...] Oxnard police have not specified a motive but said there appeared to be a personal dispute between the two.
King sometimes came to school wearing makeup and high heels, eighth-grader Nicholas Cortez, 14, told The Associated Press.
Another eighth-grader, Michael Sweeney, said King’s appearance was ”freaking the guys out,” the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
”He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails — the whole thing,” Sweeney told the Times.
King was pronounced brain dead at St. John’s Regional Medical Center on Wednesday, said Craig Stevens, senior deputy medical examiner in Ventura County. Doctors planned to remove some of his organs for donation Thursday, Stevens said.
[...]Lawrence King had been under the care of the county foster care system and lived at Casa Pacifica, a nearby center for abused and neglected children, said Steve Elson, the facility’s chief executive.
What I see, when I look beyond the obvious issue implied by the hate crime and the students’ accounts of King’s behavior, is a troubled young boy whose cry for attention got him the wrong kind of attention. Even if his family is in charge of the disposition of his vegetative body…they obviously weren’t providing the home environment he needed, if he was living in a foster care center for abused and neglected children. King’s extravagant behavior likely wasn’t a sign of gay pride, but a desperate need to make someone pay attention to him, realize something was wrong, and offer the nurturing he needed and wasn’t getting. He may not even have been gay, though I won’t rule out the possibility that he was; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be the first child to claim to be gay just to feel as if they were somehow special, set apart, and different from the people who made their lives miserable.
One can’t expect other children to possess the insight or maturity to recognize such behavior for what it is - but children are among the cruelest perpetrators of stereotypes at all, and claims that King was “freaking the guys out” likely led to this tragic event. Children see only that someone is behaving in a way different from the status quo, and don’t possess the impulse control to restrain their reactions.
However, fourteen is definitely old enough to know that violence, especially fatal violence, is not the appropriate way to express one’s prejudices. Prejudices may be a dime a dozen, but lives aren’t. There are over six billion lives on this planet, and yet every last one has invaluable worth to at least one person, even if it’s only the person in possession of it. King’s assailant can never repay the life that was lost; a young life wasted serving a sentence in jail for murder will not bring back the dead.
It’s a shame that we don’t seem to teach that well enough in schools.
(Insert appropriately irreverent and humorous tag here, because Adri isn’t in the mood to be silly after reading that.)
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February 15th, 2008 at 2:41 am
I was wondering if you were gonna write about this when I got the news this morning, and I’m glad you did. I don’t view it as an individual, tragic case. As cold as it sounds, it doesn’t matter if it was a cry for attention or if he was gay or not. What matters is how his classmates responded. And the fact that this kind of response, if maybe not to this extreme, is not uncommon.
Frankly, it was the same kind of response I got in middle school, from both teachers and students. “You’re freaking students out” and, from the more supportive ones, “just stay in the closet until high school, they have a gay straight alliance.” Middle schools and elementary schools just don’t deal with gender issues and sexuality issues. A lot of kids in middle school don’t even know what the word gay means, let alone transgendered or even bisexual, and when they’re confronted with it first hand they react with prejudice and violence. The case of King is just an extreme example.
What I see isn’t a troubled kid but a nationwide problem.
February 15th, 2008 at 2:48 am
Well…so long as they don’t blame video games for it, I think it’ll be okay. The NIU shooting earlier today will probably drag out the crazies all to point fingers, so maybe they’ll ignore this one?
However, I’m quite opposed to hate crime upgrades, so I can’t really support that part. They are a way for prosecutors to get sentences they don’t deserve and make themselves look better when it comes time for elections. Often, being gay or a minority or a vegan from Jupiter, has very little to do with the motivations for crime, but it gets blamed. My being gay shouldn’t cost someone who wronged me more than if I were straight.
February 15th, 2008 at 6:57 am
I agree that you can’t just wave hate crime legislation around in every situation possible, but in some cases where such prejudice does play a part I see no reason why the perptrator shouldn’t get something of a lesson on the values of tolerance.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:20 am
“yet every last one has invaluable worth to at least one person, even if it’s only the person in possession of it. ”
I’ve mentioned that I love you, right? Because if I haven’t, I should. You have this way of taking a news item, or an issue, or an event or a run-in with a rude boy at Walmart and bringing it right down to what really lies at the crux, what really matters.
Adri - you never fail to impress.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Adri: Sadly, the poor boy who shot King was probably in very much the same situation; desperate for attention, and for a nurturing home environment that was not there for him. Well adjusted kids with supportive parents don’t shoot people. For all I know, his personal grudge was only that “the boy in the dress” was getting more attention that he was.
Hikaru: I politely disagree. Hate crimes do deserve a greater sentence for two reasons. First, because they are much more likely to be repeated.
Second, because prejudice has been an ingrained part of our culture since the day the pilgrims stumbled of the boat. We, as an aspiring civilized society, need to make it very clear that such behavior is not acceptable - and we are fighting an uphill battle. In my mind, this message can never be strong enough.
February 16th, 2008 at 12:27 am
But Cole, what makes any one crime more hate-fueled than another? Isn’t violence in and of itself hateful? Why should I, as a gay man, have any more protection than say a straight woman? Punish the crime for the crime, and not the intent: that’s the best deterrent.
February 16th, 2008 at 1:49 am
Personally, I think if the straight woman was killed for being straight, or for being a woman, her killer should be charged with a hate crime. A hate crime is defined as a bias motivated crime, so why should it only be bias against minorities A, B, and C?
But that doesn’t eliminate the difference between Lawrence King being killed because he was Lawrence King, or because he was an openly gay boy. A hate crime is different from any other crime because the victims of a hate crime are not killed as individuals, but for being a part of some group. Intent has everything to do with that.
February 16th, 2008 at 7:42 am
The problem I have with hate crimes is that hate is something you can’t prove. There is no set line for when someone goes from severe dislike/fear/ignorance to hate. Hate is an incredibly strong word, and you can’t measure when someone hates something or someone. You can prove that someone is prejudiced, but that is not the same as hate.
Crime fueled by prejudice would be a much better term than hate crime, since the two cover substantially different things.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Hm. Hate crime upgrades can be misused. But, they are available.
Poor kid.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
But Tone, why does the fact that I’m bi make me special and require a stiffer penalty for someone killing me. If someone sees my watch and stabs me to take it…I’m still dead. If he kills me to take my watch AND because my shoes are so utterly fabulous that I must be a fag…I’m still dead. If the existing penalties for stopping a crime aren’t enough then raise the penalties for everyone. None of this “I’m a special snowflake and need special protection” crap.
If someone is convicted, obviously they need to be punished…why two sets of rules depending on whom the victim may be? Part of true equality is being equal. I want to be treated like any other guy in the world, not singled out for special protection just because I happen to enjoy cock AND vagina.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Hikaru: If you weren’t being singled out, it wouldn’t be a hate crime, now would it? When we get to the sentencing, it’s already a little past the “Please treat me like everyone else” stage.
Or if you want to talk about why we need a heavier deterrent, how about the fact that people who commit crimes based on prejudice feel much more strongly than the mugger after your watch? The idiot who thinks he’s saving the world from the scourge of Sodom needs more convincing, ne?
February 16th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Cole: So you honestly think that this hypothetical “God Warrior” is going to have a moment of clarity and stop to think to himself, “Huh, I’m going to end up spending an extra 5 years in prison for beating on this fag now, thanks to hate crime laws” as he swings a bat at my head? People who commit crimes of passion are going to commit the crime no matter the consequences. You won’t find a couple skin heads sitting on their couch doing a cost-benefit analysis of attacking random black people before heading out with their barbed-wire wrapped baseball bats. Do you really think most anti-Semites who are actually capable of violence contemplate the consequences before they mix the Molotov Cocktail, light it, and throw it at the synagogue? We can’t assign logic to the illogical, no matter how hard we try.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:16 am
No. But I DO think seeing the extreme reaction against that type of violence and mindless hatred in society helps prevent hypothetical “god warriors” from developing.
I bet none of Lawrence King’s classmates will ever wish violence on someone just for being different, after seeing what happened…
February 17th, 2008 at 1:37 am
As I said before, I don’t think someone should be charged with a hate crime for killing someone from a minority. They should be charged with a hate crime because that person being a part of a group is what made them commit that crime.
The way I view it, if a guy kills his wife for cheating on him, when he gets out in thirty to thirty five year, his wife will not be around to get killed again.
When your hypothetical “God Warrior” kills a gay man for being gay, when he gets out, there will be another gay man for him to make a target of. It’s a crime that doesn’t depend on who the victim is, which I do think makes it a lot more dangerous. In such a case, I’d rather the “God Warrior” stay in prison for another five years, if not longer.
I’m not saying the laws don’t get abused by prosecutors… If you got killed by a mugger for your watch, I wouldn’t wish on your mugger a longer sentence just because you happen to like men. That’s not what hate crime legislation was created for.
February 17th, 2008 at 1:59 am
So school integration, desegregation, the Fair Housing Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act have cured all prejudice? Education on and demonstration of the importance of equality is the only solution. Parents are passing on the prejudice of their generation in the home, but without an alternative viewpoint, there is nothing to offset that prejudice.
As a child, I had a lot of black friends at school. I remember the first time I brought my friend Andrea home to meet my mom, and how sugary-sweet mom was to her that day. In the evening, I was forced to swear never to play with any black children again under threat of the belt. If anything, the ridiculousness of the whole encounter served to open my eyes to how stupid prejudice really is; how we all need to try and accept people for who they are on the inside. The only reason that seemed so ridiculous was because they taught me better than that at school, and I learned that no matter what the color of their skin may be…a friend is still a friend.
Portal into my childhood aside, the biggest source of these oft-lamented “God Warriors” is their childhood home life. If I hadn’t known that I was “off” when the male anatomy got me off as a pubescent teen, I might have even ended up as one.
Tone, though, I agree with (sort of). Problem is that it’s not so much their prejudice that concerns me about letting them back into the general population…but their sociopathy. If this hypothetical person can hurt or kill based off of prejudice, they don’t belong on the street ever. If there wasn’t too much of a chance of people who didn’t commit crimes based on prejudice getting caught in the net, I would probably be okay with using hate crime upgrades to keep the crazies off the street. Maybe some way to have a mental health professional declare them crazy so they stay in prison?
February 17th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
With how our system works, being declared crazy is what would keep them OUT of prison *blegh*