Hate Crime Squared

Until now, it seems, the NYPD's hate crimes unit would only be called in if a crime victim was black, Middle Eastern, Jewish or gay. It was a very select group. Everyone else who was beaten, robbed or taunted, it seems, had been the victim of a love crime.

That's why we were so surprised last Wednesday to learn that hate-crime charges were being brought against two 18-year-olds from Queens. The pair had been arrested for beating a 20-year-old goth kid from their neighborhood with a metal pipe. Because the pair mocked the victim's religious beliefs prior to the attack, this was by definition, a hate crime. That the victim was a Satanist instead of, say, an Episcopalian or a Sikh didn't matter. So now instead of a few months in jail on assault charges, they're looking at the possibility of 15 years.

We think those goth kids are pretty silly, ourselves. We're also no fans of the hate-crime statutes in general, feeling they're too often abused by the "professional victim class" they were designed to placate. Still, we were pleased to see the rules concerning who's allowed to be the victim of a hate crime expanded.

The same can't be said about the local tabs, who couldn't resist running with headlines like "Qns. Satanist Catches Hell" (Daily News) and "Devil of a Beating for Queens Satanist" (The Post). Reading those, we had to wonder-if the victim in this case had been Muslim, Catholic or gay, would they have used headlines like "Allah Be Pummeled," "Priest Gets Holy Crap Beaten Out of Him," or "Gay Man's Wrist Not so Limp in Cast"? We doubt it (except maybe for that first one).

While the Post was surprisingly self-contained, and the Times mostly befuddled as they tried to make heads or tails of this whole weird "goth" thing, the News went to town. They made repeated references to victim Daniel Romano's "Rejection of Jesus," even going so far as to call his attackers "God-fearing thugs." It was an unbelievable smear job.

Romano is portrayed as a whiner and a sissy who can't go to school because he's claustrophobic, as someone who's weird and therefore bad. They even pull in the Church of Satan's Peter Gilmore (a very nice man, by the way), to deny that Romano was affiliated with the Church.

One of the God-fearing thugs' attorneys, Sean McNicholas, was quoted as calling the charges an abuse of the law ("What's next," he asked, "the nerds, the preppies...? Where are you going to draw the line?"), and made it clear to the Times that he felt "hate crimes" only applied to blacks, Jews, Hispanics and gays.

(But alas, since hate crimes are defined as attacks triggered by a victim's ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation, this one counts.)

The News stopped just short of coming right out and saying that the kid got what he deserved for being a weirdo with blue hair who hates Jesus. They did, however, include a sidebar-"The Devil's Trademark"-a handy-dandy checklist of several easy-to-spot things for you and your God-fearing buddies to look for when you're out hunting for a devil-worshipper to pound.

Maybe one of these days, after the next anti-Semitic assault or gay bashing, they'll provide us with a similar checklist of simple ways to identify Jews and gays.