According to the morning paper, sixteen members of an Amish sect in Ohio have rejected plea bargains which would have reduced their potential jail time from 20+ years to two or three years. Some may even have been eligible for parole. Their crime? Cutting the beards and hair of fellow church members in order to send a message that they should be ashamed of themselves for the way they were treating fellow Amish! Because short hair and beards are considered to be deeply offensive in the Amish culture, U.S. prosecutors have decided this was a hate crime! So what is a hate crime? According to Wikipedia, current statutes permit federal prosecution of hate crimes committed on the basis of a person's protected characteristics of race , religion , ethnicity , nationality , gender , sexual orientation , gender identity , and disability . I suppose an argument could be made that the current crime is an attack on the religion of the victims, but ...
My alarm clock goes off every morning at eight, except for the few times when I have a breakfast date. Usually I wake up about an hour before that, or at least I partly wake up. It is important that I remain in a “not quite awake but not quite asleep” state, because I consider that time as the germination period for whatever seeds happen to have blown into my head.