In his section on the third commandment in The Institutes of Biblical Law, Rushdoony has an excellent analysis of positive versus negative laws. He says that laws of negation seem oppressive and tyrannical to modern man. Thus the primitive and harsh prohibition “Thou shalt not steal.”

Thus the Black Panther leader, and Peace and Freedom presidential candidate, Eldredge Cleaver, declared in 1968, that, “if elected, he would do away with the property program, and substitute ‘public safety officials’ for police.” Public safety officials produced a reign of terror in the French Revolution, and not without reason, because a positive law can only lead to tyranny and totalitarianism.  (p. 101)

Negative laws, on the other hand, not only bind criminals who are exercising power unlawfully, they bind magistrates who have more power than any criminal and therefore more temptation to use it unlawfully. You don’t have to agree with Lord Acton that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely to see what is going on in our current justice system. Where power remains unchecked, it destroys liberty. Where negative laws are proclaimed and enforced, power is used appropriately. Tangentially, this is why pulpits that preach the hard edges of God’s law produce soft hearts, and those who go soft on Moses create people whose actions betray granite hearts.

Rushdoony says “a negative concept of law insures liberty: except for the prohibited areas, all of man’s life is beyond the law, and the law is of necessity indifferent to it. If the commandment says, “Thous shalt not steal,” it means that the law can only govern theft: it cannot govern or control honestly acquired property. When the law prohibits blasphemy and false witness, it guarantees that all other forms of speech have their liberty. The negativity of the law is the preservation of the positive life and freedom of man” (p. 102). But tell me, what does calling something a “hate crime” accomplish? It accomplishes the special agenda of those who want to penalize whoever disagrees with the opinion of the current state. Anything can be a hate crime because who determines what hate is besides an omnicompetent state? Negative laws are broken by objective definition of the act. I’ve never heard of a love crime, and regardless of why someone assaulted his neighbor, the law punishes the act. A hate crime is akin to Orwell’s thought crime, an attempt of the state to be all controlling. “Because the law is unlimited, the state is unlimited. It becomes the business of the state, not to control evil, but to control all men. Basic to every totalitarian regime is a positive concept of the function of the law” (p. 102).

Christians can agree that all sorts of things are sinfully hateful. It’s a sin to hate a homosexual, and good churches ought to discipline for it. But this is completely different from making it a crime, and turning the state into a god.