I spotted a bumper sticker the other day. It informed me that, “The death penalty is a hate crime.” Well now. Let’s think about that for a moment, purely from a semantic point of view.

The death penalty is the product of a process involving judges, lawyers and juries. The judge is supposedly impartial, the lawyers are in it either for principle or for money, and the jury is a bunch of people who have a collective blend of loves, hates and prejudices. Delivering a death sentence is a process constrained by a complex series of laws.

I wonder, then, where is the hate and where is the crime? We’re talking about a legal (read: “made of laws, therefore not a crime”) process that’s had most of the humanity squeezed out of it to begin with (so, there’s no more hate involved than any other emotion one could name).

Go ahead and disagree with the death penalty in principle if you see fit, but framing the argument in terms that don’t even make sense in the context isn’t going to help your cause. It just makes people like me shake our heads in bewilderment.

(Please note that I’m not looking for a debate on the merits of the death penalty itself. It’s the message’s phrasing itself that concerned me. Call me crazy if you must.)