Now that the Minister for the Status of Women has suggested that the federal government is looking into amending the Criminal Code to enhance punishments for “honour killings” — and then unsaid the same thing — it may be useful to reconsider the many problems with laws that try to criminalize thoughts.

Most people would agree that a man who kills a daughter or sister because she has somehow “dishonourned” the family (perhaps by dressing immodestly or having a boyfriend of a different religion) should be locked up for life, or worse. It’s just that, most people would also agree that a man who kills a daughter or sister for any other reason — insurance money, jealousy, hatred, to make way for a new girlfriend or wife — should also be locked up for life.

Whatever the particular form a murderer’s perverse thinking might have taken, all innocent victims are equally deserving of justice for the real crime that has taken place: homicide. It does a dead woman no good if her attacker’s thoughts happen to have been less politically inflammatory than they might have been (reflecting avarice instead of primitive sexism, for example). Nor is she any worse off if her attacker’s brand of hatred happens to have been one categorized by the government as especially evil. She’s not coming back either way, and it is for this — and nothing else — that the guilty party must be punished.

But what about sending a message to particular immigrant communities that we won’t stand for the mistreatment of women?

That’s not necessary if we’re already vigorously enforcing the existing criminal code, since it makes clear that we won’t stand for the mistreatment of any individual. By severely punishing all murderers to the full extent of the law, without bending over backwards trying to impugn particular sub-strains of malignancy, we are sending the message that all murder is despicable. Or we should be, at any rate.

If there is a problem with the present state of our criminal law, it is not that we need to further break down crimes by their perpetrators’ motivation. It is that we need to be more aggressive about seeking the maximum penalty in murder cases (all murder cases) — and less willing to sacrifice justice for money and time by settling for plea bargains without going to trial.

Not having been tough enough about prosecution for years, we’ll now have an uphill battle changing the culture amongst underfunded and overworked Crown attorneys. But it’s a worthwhile battle — and a far more relevant and promising one than cramming more thought-crime provisions (which are difficult to prove — imagine a whole trial that turns on semantic dissertations on the meaning of “honour”) into the Criminal Code.

If a man who is about to murder a daughter for disrespecting her family is not dissuaded by the general prohibition on homicide, will he suddenly change his mind if he learns of a legislative revision to the aggravating-factors sentencing portion of Criminal Code section 718?

Not a chance. We have a far better shot of giving him pause if he notices a more general but pertinent trend: Murderers in Canada are actually being sent to jail for their entire lives.

Since we’ve already got our work cut out for us making such a trend a reality, let’s leave the efforts at purifying criminals’ thoughts and consciences for another time. Suffice it to say that if such a cleansing of the psyche were as easy as amending the law, Freud probably would have just joined the criminal bar rather than wasting all that time with the couch.