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this last point dippin makes is important, it seems to me.
because it points to what folk who oppose this are skirting around, trying not to argue.
are you saying that racism is not a problem? are you saying that homophobia is not a problem?
there are several ways to address broader contextual issues: one would be to change the culture in which racism &/or homophobia are made legitimate. given freedom of speech laws, you can't simply do that. you can do it via cultural or political pressure, but it's a diffuse and long-term process. but you can address the outcomes which are *enabled* by the persistence of these discourses (if you like)...and hate crimes is a way to do that.
so the question is only "double protection for individuals" if you refuse to see the social dimension of this and prefer to focus entirely on the individual, as if legal frameworks are not themselves social, as if the definitions they outline are not themselves socio-political expressions. the only viable alternative, even logically, for arguing otherwise is some notion of natural law. but that runs into so many problems that it's typically not worth bothering with.
so conservatives can't say "but we like being racist"---because in general it's not true. they can't say "we take racism to be a form of conservative speech and so using the famous slippery slope argument, we see ourselves as being next" because (a) it equates the two and (b) the argument is itself logically stupid.
so instead what you get is yet another version of the conservative-as-victim trope. and that's what these arguments against this move regarding hate crime law are really about. they don't have to make sense, really--they're motivated by a sense of conservative victimization. "other people now have more rights than i do"---which *only* makes sense if you frame out most of reality.
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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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