Ever seen a picture of Lady Justice? That skinny woman with the big hips who has a sheet draped around her body holding a balanced scale while blind-folded? She’s supposed to represent the ideal of “justice.” I’ve always thought she looks like the ideal of some strange sexual deviance with the blindfold and the toga. The reason she looks like she’s ready to pin the tail on the donkey is because justice is supposed to be blind. You realize that’s impossible, right?

Blind justice is an ideal that can never be achieved. There’s no way that you can have human lawyers, human judges and very human juries and still have a fair trial without the biases we were all taught and retain to some degree. No matter how much time you spend volunteering at the soup kitchen and hanging out in the M-Shop feeling liberal, you still have prejudice in your soul.

Not that anyone should be faulted for that; it’s just the way of the world. All you can hope to do is limit your prejudice as much as possible.

It works the same way in the legal system. Lady Justice is peeking out the corner of the blindfold, and we know we can’t stop her.

I think the concept of hate crimes is flawed and because of that, it ensures that justice won’t be blind.

Let’s examine what a hate crime is.

A hate crime is a criminal act based in hatred for an ideology or a group of people. Hate crimes are committed in part because the individual doing the act wishes to terrorize and strike fear into the hearts of those he hates.

For example, if you stand across from a synagogue and yell, “Jews are evil! Die Jew, die!” you’re pretty much fine, but if you walk across the street and spray paint a swastika on the synagogue wall, you’re going to be playing bitch to a boy named Butch for about three years.

Now, I don’t mean to be insensitive to anyone who happens to belong to a group which has traditionally been the object of hate crimes, but why are hate crimes more illegal than the same crime without the feeling of hate driving it? I understand being more outraged about a hate crime, but we must separate our emotions from the courtroom.

In the case of the anti-semitic Nazi, compare his case to that of a bunch of junior high punks who just spray paint randomly on the synagogue.

They committed vandalism, but even if they weren’t juveniles, there would be no way they would be going to jail. Because they didn’t have hateful thoughts in their mind when they were committing their crime? Because their vandalism didn’t offend and disgust the community’s majority? That’s insane.

No matter how badly it seems like the right thing to do, you can’t make it illegal to be stupid, prejudiced or close-minded. Maybe you think it’s a stretch to bring in the Bill of Rights on this, but I completely believe that the First Amendment applies here.

The reason that Nazi would receive a much stricter sentence than the punks is because of what he believes. What he believes is moronic, but it’s his belief and it’s not anyone’s place to punish him exclusively for that. His anti-semitic beliefs are covered by the freedom of speech the same way this column is.

The thugs who beat and killed Matthew Shepard committed a hate crime. They led a homosexual out into the boonies, tied him up and beat him to death. This is a horrible example of hate in our society. How people could grow up in this day and age and still have a level of hate that intense for a person just because he has a different sexual orientation is simply disturbing.

But let’s just assume that in Wyoming, the maximum penalty for murder is life in prison but the maximum for murder if it is declared hate crime was the death penalty.

Would you support that? Most people probably would call that justice.

Without even getting into whether the death penalty could ever be called justice, why would anyone say that? Was Matthew Shepard’s life more important than a man who was killed in New York City for his wallet? I don’t believe so, and the crime shouldn’t be any more illegal in the eyes of the law. The motive for a crime should not affect the penalty. We can’t make killing for the wrong reason a greater travesty in the eyes of our legal system.

We must protect the rights of bigots simply because injustice is a disease. The veil of righteousness that we originally hide wrongs under can soon become a shroud that becomes wrapped around the corpse of what used to be the land of the free.

It’s not an easy thing to sit back and let the stupid in our society run amuck, but it’s America — and that’s one of the hellish prices we’ve got to pay. All we can do is try to educate people and try to attack the problem at its root.

But to say that a hate crime is more illegal than the same crime committed for a different reason is to abandon those same ideals we need to spread to the prejudiced. This is a mistake we cannot afford to make.

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David Roepke is a sophomore in journalism and mass communications from Aurora.