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i'm unclear about the grounds for objecting to the idea of hate crimes as well. on this particular matter, i think red lemon is right, really: if the construct exists it makes no sense not to extend it to include crimes motivated by homophobia.
intent is obviously the key, but in the sense of a legal definition of intent. hate crimes are directed against entire categories of people, even as they are visited upon individuals who happen to occupy a position, one way or another, within that category. so you can look at this in two ways: one would be to say that all that matters is the individual action. this seems to be the conservative position. so the individual action may or may not have been motivated by racism--and the motivation would be important i suppose--but really what would matter is the particular machinery involved that resulted in the particular action. so the underlying idea i suppose is that you would move from the particular to the general.
the other way of seeing it would be to say that racism or homophobic crimes move from the general to the particular. they depart from, refer to and are structured by---even if that structuring is an *aspect* of the decision chain that results in a particular action---broader contexts in which racism or homophobia are articulated and situated as legitimate.
from there the idea seems obvious---and this isn't really saying much that dippin did not already say---hate crime is a mechanism within a legal system geared around individual actions taken in isolation to address the outcomes of political contexts which are understood by most people as being unacceptable, both in themselves and in their (real and potential) consequences. that's why the category exists.
a possible avenue for the debate to head down from here is the usual thing that lines up conservatives who like to pretend there is no racism, there is no homophobia on the one hand and other folk against them. there's also a problem that some folk dislike thinking in aggregates and prefer to pretend there's only individuals. but that seems to me a fantasy-space. but at least it's a different debate.
you could say that any definition of anything at all groups phenomena. that there is a construct "murderer" groups people who are convicted of murder. any category does that, legal or not. its what categories do.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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