Mary Rucinski
Staff Writer
Wyoming is one of four states without hate crime legislation, listed among Arkansas, Georgia and South Carolina, according to an article from Newsweek late Aug.
A hate crime is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “any of various crimes when motivated by hostility to the victim as a member of a group.”
“If there are crimes committed that can be proven that hate was intentionally involved, yes, I would be in favor of stricter penalties in that case,” Wyoming State Representative Dan Furphy said.
Michael McDaniel, a graduate assistant at the University of Wyoming, said a hate crime is motivated by a bias against someone for a trait they cannot control, such as skin color, gender or sexual orientation.
McDaniel created the Wyoming Hate Watch Facebook page that monitors what McDaniel, and others who work with him, deem hateful rhetoric. McDaniel started the page because he “noticed there was an increase in hateful rhetoric on social media in Wyoming.”
“When you see an increase in this kind of ideology in rhetoric online or even in public upfront discourse, you can expect to see a rise in violence against minority groups,” McDaniel said.
“The majority of the population are white, a majority of our state government are white male Republicans who already hold contemporary social conservative beliefs, and because they are not the targets of bigotry they do not believe it is an issue,” McDaniel said about the first reason why Wyoming does not have a hate crime legislation.
The second reason, McDaniel said, for the lack of hate crime legislation is that since the 90s, there has been a push in Wyoming state government of right-wing ideas through the infiltration of right wing groups in state government.
“We put off as a state that’s – and people would deny this, even though they’re saying it in public forums – is that we don’t want other people here,” McDaniel said. He explained the right-wing infiltration perpetuates this idea.
“We have several questions to get answered before I can say whether we would support hate crime legislation or not,” Furphy said.
Furphy said it is important to know if there is truly an issue of hate crimes in Wyoming. He said gaining this knowledge is the “first step” to hate crime legislation.
“We still do not have good data on hate crimes,” he said. Furphy said he supported hate crime research in Wyoming to gain that data.
McDaniel said hate crimes in Wyoming are low, but that is not necessarily because they are not happening, but more because of a lack of reporting mechanism in the state.
“There’s no actual reporting mechanism, because we don’t have that legislation, so we just don’t know how many actual crimes are committed,” he said.
Bridget Delany, a junior at the University of Wyoming studying Gender and Women’s Studies weighed in on the issue.
“I think that we need to be careful when we’re calling things a hate crime, obviously it’s not a good thing when a crime is committed against anyone regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, or their nationality,” Delany said.
“When we start to draw the line, and we get to determine legally what is hate, I think the idea of hate loses all concept and morality because all crimes are driven by rage, and no crime is good, all crimes are from hate,” she said.
McDaniel said people who say there need not be a distinction between different motives, but that juries already take into consideration motives are “the same people who say that there’s not an issue with it to begin with.” He said that is the main narrative in Wyoming.
