The effort to bring federal charges has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who argue the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes.
Three months after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Justice Department is weighing how to bring federal charges against the shooter, including under a novel legal theory that it was an anti-Christian hate crime, according to three people familiar with the investigation.
The suspect, Tyler Robinson, is already facing multiple state charges, including an aggravated murder count, and Utah prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty. Robinson’s partner is trans, and authorities have produced text messages from the suspect to his partner saying he was motivated to kill Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred.”
It’s not uncommon for defendants to face both state and federal charges, including for drug-related crimes and domestic terrorist attacks, among other offenses. But the effort to bring federal charges in the Kirk case has been met with resistance by some career prosecutors who have argued that the crime doesn’t appear to fall under any federal statutes, the three people said.
Right. And we’re talking about Christian on Christian crime. Take a parallel, make it about race, then tell the same story.
It’s an interesting thing to do when discrimination comes into play… Swap out gender or race or LGBTQ and see what the parallel feels like to your gut.
How is it an interesting thing to do?
Hateful bigotry is bad, is that your point?
… Religion is the only one of those things that, by definition, constitutes a worldview that… very often serves as a generator of violent bigotry, in and of itself.
‘Race’, gender, sexual orientation, those things can lead to the actual enactment of violent bigotry against outgroup members… but they have to be paired with an accompanying worldview and/or material economic situation of disparity for that to arise.
Religion is the only one of those that doesn’t need any extra components for its adherents, its members, to enact violent bigotry against outgroup members.
I’m not justifying violent bigotry.
I’m explaining what causes it:
So long as there are idiotic squabbles over nonsensical and contradictory and logically incoherent worldviews, that are deeply held with great conviction, there will be violent bigotry.
Further, ‘race’ itself is an ultimately incoherent construct, it is a worldview, one that is just so ingrained into so many that we don’t even realize this.
People groups exist, ethnolinguistic groups exist, heritages of haplogroups exist… ‘race’ doesn’t, ‘race’ is a way of thinking, promulgated by some societies, that just clumsily and incoherently defines people into ingroup and outgroup members, and then oppresses the outgroup members so hard that they are functionally forced to adopt it as a practical, lived identity.
Imagine trying to do the ‘one drop rule’ with the US conception of ‘white people’.
Oh, sure, you’re uh I dunno, Norweigan, eh? Well, there’s actually a German, and even a Spaniard, somewhere in your set of great great grandparents, so clearly, you’re some kind of white mochalatto, not really pure white, thus impure.
… Absolute nonsense.
Gender and sexual orientation?
These are unchangeable, naturally arising aspects of people, that some other people with some worldviews may choose to hate, or not.
Religion?
Very often the worldview that chooses to hate.
‘Race’?
Yeah, more complicated, more like a clumsy worldview that is enforced onto others untill they adopt it or have no choice but to adopt it… by certain other kinds of worldviews, which are very often religions.
That’s a belief that some people have. But gender isn’t as binary as you might think. And more importantly, how gender is manifested is a social construct, and it is, in some uncommon chases, changeable. And I know a number of people whose sexual orientation has changed in the course of their lives, or who could be said to have no fixed sexual orientation at all.
And views on race are a complete dog’s breakfast, full of clinal attributes that are forced into bullshit binary categories that miserably fail to reflect the incredible multidimensional spectrum of human phenotypes and cultures.