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Evangelical views university 'hate crimes' case as a warning

A prominent evangelical Christian leader says a recent arrest at a New York university demonstrates how so-called "hate crimes" laws end up being "thought control" laws, and how such charges have the potential to chill public opposition to Islamic teaching.

Police say a Brooklyn man was arrested Friday on hate-crime charges after he threw a Koran in a toilet at Pace University in New York on two separate occasions. The suspect reportedly was confronted by detectives with a surveillance photo of himself leaving a Pace meditation room where the Korans were kept.

Pace initially classified the first desecration of the Koran as an act of vandalism. But after Muslim activists claimed the school was not taking the incident seriously enough, university officials later reversed themselves and referred the incident to the New York Police Department's hate crimes unit.

Gary Bauer, the president of American Values, says the Pace University case shows how hate crime laws can be used to promote a specific political agenda. "Our society unfortunately has been willing to tolerate a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine -- and that was called 'art,'" he recalls.

"Routinely we see stories about students burning American flags," Bauer continues, "and the courts have said that that's totally acceptable as a form of free speech. So it's hard to see, then, how this can be a hate crime, a felony."

Bauer also has concerns where such application of hate crimes laws could lead in the U.S. He notes that in Canada and throughout Europe, people who have spoken out against Islam have already been charged under hate crime statutes.

"It's not far-fetched at all to think that the courts in the United States could go down the same road," he says, "given that we've already seen this precedent elsewhere -- and given that in recent years a lot of federal judges have cited how other countries are enforcing the law as a basis for the court decisions that they make here in the United States." The American Values president says that judicial trend "is just one more reason that we need to be very careful before implementing so-called 'hate crime' laws that really end up being thought control laws."

Bauer says destroying a Koran may be inappropriate and offensive to some, but it is a double standard to classify the act as a hate crime while flag burning and defacing Christian symbols are "shrugged off as art or protest."