[Mb-civic] The flames of hate in Alabama - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The flames of hate in Alabama

By Jeff Jacoby  |  February 15, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

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.

Fortunately, those sickening scenarios are only hypothetical. Here is 
one that is not:

In the past two weeks, 10 Baptist churches have been burned in rural 
Alabama. Five churches in Bibb County -- Ashby Baptist, Rehobeth 
Baptist, Antioch Baptist, Old Union Baptist, and Pleasant Sabine -- were 
torched between midnight and 3 a.m. on Feb. 3. Four days later, 
arsonists destroyed or badly damaged Morning Star Missionary Baptist 
Church in Greene County, Dancy First Baptist Church in Pickens County, 
and two churches in Sumter County, Galilee Baptist and Spring Valley 
Baptist. On Saturday, Beaverton Freewill Baptist Church in northwest 
Alabama became the 10th house of worship to go up in flames.

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?

Running through the coverage of the latest church burnings is an almost 
palpable yearning to cast the story in racial terms. ''Federal 
investigators are looking for two white men for questioning in 
connection with a string of church fires in central Alabama," began a 
National Public Radio story on Friday. ''Race may be a factor." In fact, 
race seems not to be a factor at all -- five of the churches had mostly 
white congregations, five were largely black. To a media ever ready to 
expose racism in American culture, the arsonists' lack of regard for 
skin color must be maddening.

In 1996, a spate of fires in the South was wildly and falsely trumpeted 
in the media as an eruption of racism. ''We are facing an epidemic of 
terror," said Deval Patrick, the Clinton administration's assistant 
attorney general for civil rights. But as it turned out, there was no 
racist conspiracy. More than a third of the arsonists arrested were 
black, and more than half the churches burned were white. So perhaps it 
is progress of a sort that, this time around, the media are keeping in 
check the urge to cry ''Racism!"

But real progress will come only when we abandon the whole misguided 
notion of ''hate crimes," which deems certain crimes more deserving of 
outrage and punishment not because of what the criminal did, but because 
of the group to which the victim belonged. The burning of a church is a 
hateful act regardless of the congregants' skin color. That some people 
bend over backward not to say so is a disgrace.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/15/the_flames_of_hate_in_alabama/
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