"If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense." In response, I'll just quote David Neiwert again (for sou

"If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense." In response, I'll just quote David Neiwert again (for sources, see the links in my previous post above): Throughout the text, they consistently describe hate crimes laws as being designed to create special "protected groups," a focus derived solely from viewing the special-interest advocacy that often spurred these laws' passage. Moreover, they consistently describe the laws as protecting only these selected groups and not everyone in society equally. This is simply a false characterization of the laws themselves. None of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims -- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in either case. Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI statistics for yourself. Hate-crimes laws generally have three chief categories of bias motivation: racial, ethnic and religious. Some statutes include sexual orientation, others include gender bias. It's important to keep in mind that everyone has a race, an ethnicity, a religion (or even lack thereof). Everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender. This is what makes the laws generally universal and fully in tune with the equal-protection clause. ... These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and there are two components of it that need addressing. ... First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years. Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch. It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair. Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes. The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt Welch puts it in the post that started this debate: So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond. But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial. Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in most respects, indeed in nearly every detail): Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes. This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes reported to the police involve assaults. Secondly, bias-motivated crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults generally is closer to 30 percent. … Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific, personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference]. Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics that made him a victim. A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. … … Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community. Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the security of its members and their property but also the shared value of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination principle that have become fundamental not only to the American legal system but to American culture as well. Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.