179. “Hate crimes” vs. adultery: which is worse?
179. “HATE CRIMES” VS. ADULTERY: WHICH IS WORSE?
Is hatred the worst of sins against our neighbor?
There are sins by which a man hurts his neighbor more than by hatred, e.g., theft, murder and adultery. . . .
Sins committed against our neighbor are evil on two counts: first by reason of the disorder in the person who sins; secondly by reason of the hurt inflicted on the person sinned against. On the first count, hatred is a more grievous sin than external actions that hurt our neighbor because hatred is a disorder of man’s will, which is the chief part of man; and in this is the root of sin, so that if a man’s outward actions were to be inordinate without any disorder in his will, they would not be sinful, for instance if he were to kill a man through ignorance. . . . On the other hand, as regards the hurt inflicted on his neighbor, a man’s outward sins are worse than his inward hatred (II-II,34,4).
As usual, St. Thomas answers a difficult and controversial question by making a basic distinction which, once we see it, we know is commonsensical. (But common sense is not very common.)
Traditional or “conservative” morality evaluates crimes primarily by the objective harm they do. Thus murder and adultery are great crimes. Modern, more subjective and psychological, morality evaluates crimes primarily or even wholly by the inner state of soul of the criminal. This subjective perspective is a legitimate and important one, but it should not lead to subjectivism and a denial or ignoring of the traditional, objective dimension. Jesus did not compromise on either of these two dimensions. It is a mistake to specialize when it comes to morality.
Since love (charity) is the greatest spiritual and subjective and personal good, it logically follows that the greatest subjective and personal evils are love’s opposites, which are both positive hate and negative indifference or lovelessness. So if “hate crimes” means not merely whatever words happen to offend a certain class of people but the crime of harming your own soul by deliberately and actively hating other people, then hate crimes are the worst of crimes. However, they may not issue in deeds, or even words, against another person, and thus may not harm others. The one who is hated may not even know that he is being hated.
But a sneer can be a greater crime than a murder subjectively, for a sneer means “You are beneath contempt, you are sub-human, you are worthless scum, you are not even worth taking the trouble and time to kill”, while a murder may mean “You are important and formidable and you are my enemy, and thus I must kill you.” That can be a compliment, compared to a sneer.
Today, especially in “advanced” places like Canada and Scandanavia, where “adultery” is almost equated with “adult”, “hate crimes” mean merely offending groups of people who demand to adulterate sex without being labeled and judged as adulterers. (For instance, it is a “hate crime” to quote certain politically incorrect verses from the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in any public arena.) That morality does not deserve much more than a sneer.
The unbridgeable gap between the old, traditional morality and the new politically correct one is almost wholly about sex. If sex is merely a biological fact that can afford great pleasure, then the old morality is ridiculously superstitious and oppressive: superstitious because it saw sex as part of the image of God (Gen 1:27), as a foretaste of mystical, self-forgetful Heavenly love, and as divinely ordered toward the greatest ongoing miracle in the world, the creation of billions of new, eternal, and intrinsically valuable things called persons; and oppressive because this myth was superimposed onto the simple biological fact and psychological opportunity for pleasure, which was made by the Church to carry a weight of meaning and purpose and responsibility that it did not really have—as if the Church forbade us to cut down trees because she believed that Tolkien’s mythical Ents, the talking trees in The Lord of the Rings, were literally true. But if sex is the high and holy mystery that the Church sees it as . . .