Josh Hawley was against hate crime laws — till he could exploit the Nashville shooting | Opinion

The worst thing about a mass shooting in America is, well, the mass shooting: the bloody death and horror and devastated communities our all-too-routine slaughters leave behind. The constant cycle of mourning is exhausting and embittering.

The second-worst thing? People who exploit those tragedies for power.

America experienced another one of those massacres this week, this time in Nashville. The lives of three children and three adults at a Christian school were cruelly destroyed — killed — reportedly by a 28-year-old transgender former student of the school who was under care for an emotional disorder.

Josh Hawley, Missouri’s senior U.S. senator, stepped forward to fan the flames of rage.

On Tuesday, he summoned the full force of his platform to suggest that the Biden administration and LGBT activists were somehow fine with the horror in Nashville — that at best they’re taking the killing of Christians lightly, and at worst perhaps even encouraged the slaughter.

On the Senate floor: “This murderous rampage, this taking of innocent life, was a horrific crime. But more specifically, it was a hate crime. A crime that, according to Nashville police, specifically targeted — that’s their word — targeted the members of this Christian community, the members of this religious institution, its students, its educators, its employees.”

On Twitter: “Those individuals or groups who have spread a message of hate against the Christian community — which resulted here in horrific violence — should be held to account.”

Again on Twitter: “When will the White House condemn this hate crime against Christian children and teachers.”

On Fox News: “Biden should be acknowledging the targeting of people of faith.”

Untrammeled anger is the natural, even correct response to the heinous crime in Nashville. Many Americans have been living with that anger for years — from Columbine to Sandy Hook to Parkland to way too many other school shootings. The alternative is to become numb to evil.

Yet Hawley’s thunder seems anything but genuine.

Why? Three reasons.

First, the senator has gotten ahead of the publicly known facts in the case. It seems clear the Nashville shooter targeted Covenant School specifically — but so far there are no reports of a general animus toward Christians, or evidence of influence by “groups” spreading anti-Christian hate. Hawley is recklessly casting aspersions without facts in hand.

Second, Hawley’s attitude about hate crimes is extraordinarily conditional. In 2021, he was the only U.S. senator to vote against a measure to monitor and prevent hate crimes against Asian Americans, as The Star’s Daniel Desrochers has reported. The bill, he said, “turns the federal government into the speech police” and “gives government sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it.”

Now? Hawley’s definition of a “hate crime” — one that’s worth pursuing, at least — seems to depend on if victims share his values.

Finally, it’s fair to wonder where Hawley’s passion on mass shootings has been all this time. When 19 students and two teachers were killed at Uvalde, Texas, last year, the senator issued a comparatively bland, four-line statement with a perfunctory call for tougher sentences for violent crime. (On his website, the release is tagged “Second Amendment.”) And I can find no record of any Hawley statement on November’s shootings at a Colorado LGBT nightclub that killed five people.

No daylong Twitter jeremiads. No angry press statements. No running to the cameras for attention.

And no public anger about the common denominator: America’s bloodthirsty worship of guns. The Uvalde shooting was different from the Colorado killings, and both were different from this week’s Nashville horror. But all three crimes were committed by unstable people who never should have had firearms in the first place.

You won’t hear Josh Hawley talk about that.

So, yes, it sure seems like the senator’s post-Nashville publicity blitz was backed by a little cynicism. Real leaders try to solve America’s problems — and they try to resolve conflict. On Tuesday, it sure seemed like Josh Hawley was making a terrible day that much worse.