apparently it's extremely difficult, otherwise the law wouldn't be necessary

but it's not a law to fix a broken law. again, what this is trying to do is legislate for the failure of a small portion of society and it's bigotry. It does it by elevating the legal protection of other groups. it's immoral and should be unconstitutional.

Except people have been charged with hate crimes for anti-white, anti-christian, and anti heterosexual bias.

and why were those necessary?

Because just as we distinguish between crimes that are premeditated and those that are not, between crimes that are done with malice and those that are not, we should distinguish against crimes that are done targeting an entire segment of the population.

thought crimes laws, right?

No more thought crimes than distinguishing between premeditated and not premeditated, malice or no malice, and so on.

Someone needs to clear up the "this makes murdered gay people more important than murdered straight people" premise.....I'm fascinated by its absurdity.

It is kind of absurd. It actually doesn't prioritize murder victims based on some sort of protected class criteria. What it does to is add another level of punishment based on the perpetrator's motivation, which is actually nothing new.

I'd be curious to see the statistics in which these crimes actually have a clear "hate" motivation. My problem with hate crimes is that it's nearly impossible to estabilish intent without a confession, or witnesses testifying that said person was spueing hate speach while committing said crime. Is it possible that alot of people have been charged and convicted for a hate crime for which the victim just happened to be of a different race, creed, sexual orientation and the purpotrator didn't neccessarily commit the crime because of those reasons?

Whether or not a law is difficult to prosecute has no bearing on whether there should be that law or not. After all, the same thing can be said for all the variations of the charges of murder and homicide.

But my point is that if somebody gets into a bar fight for example, over something as trivial as a sporting event, and the person who lost the fight just happened to be gay, would it be fair to charge him with a hate crime on top of assault? Would that be just?

That's where it gets hairy IMO when it comes to hate crime laws.

Which is why, as with any other crime, the person has to be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is no different than trying to the decide whether the hypothetical brawler should be charged with assault in the first degree and assault in the second degree, or even with sexual assault. The difference in the three types of assault is one of intent.

This is interesting to me. It sounds like you'd like to see the statistics, but then it also sounds like even if you saw them, you'd assume they were inaccurate.

In any case, you've summed up, with hate crimes as an example, one of the problems with all criminal prosecutions: the evidence is often incomplete and biased.

I wouldn't assume they were inaccurate. Statistics are statistics, if they prove me wrong I would accept it. I'm not against them per say, but I feel they further divide us alinto subgroups instead of making everyone equal under the law.

As has been pointed out, hate crimes require evidence just as anything else. Doing something bad to a gay person does not make it a hate crime. Doing something bad to a gay person because he is gay does.

As has been noted, different levels of crime based on intent is nothing new whatsoever. Hate crime legislation doesn't make gay people more valuable than straight people any more than the victim of premeditated murder is more valuable than the victim of a crime of passion. If your problem with hate crimes truly is the sense that victims of a crime with the same result are being treated differently, then I can't see any reason why you'd support different degrees of murder either. In all cases, someone is dead.

Of course, the legal system isn't your own personal revenge machine, so it doesn't really give a fuck about the victim (at least, it shouldn't). The law is there to judge the criminal and create a safer society for us all to live in. So, we collectively decide that we are generally more forgiving of someone who murders in a crime of passion than someone who commits a premeditated act of murder. Likewise, we collectively decide that crimes against someone specifically because they are a member of an oft-persecuted group should be especially discouraged. Such crimes have a negative psychological effect on the whole group and are particularly detrimental to society.

I just see an opportunity for abuse of the system. People being charged with hate crimes because of the race, creed, or orientation of the victim, even though the purpotrator may not have had that intention. An over zealous DA can certainly take advantage.

You do know that hate crimes has been part of the legislation since 1969, right? The only thing new is the addition of sexual orientation. And the number of people charged with hate crimes is significantly less than the number of crimes that cross race/gender/religious boundaries.

And the overzealous DA will still have to make the case for intention in a court of law.

In any case, again, how is this different from determining the intent in any other case? A person throws a rock, hits the other in the head, killing them. The person who threw the rock can be charged with anything from manslaughter in the third degree to murder in the first, all depending on the intent of the person.

It just seemed like you were requesting statistics with your first sentence, but then used the rest of the paragraph to point out that you doubted it would be possible for those statistics to be accurately gathered.

In any case, this law isn't contributing to inequality under the law. We can all be victims of hate crimes.

Yes I do know that is has been around for quite a while. I'm just of the opinion that in order to irradicate inequality(racism, homophobia etc.) then all must be on an equal footing, not be divided into subgroups under the law. Again just my opinion.

And again, the law doesn't divide into subgroups, protects certain groups or anything like that. It treats crimes motivated by race, religion, sexual orientation and so on differently because they are different. Hate crimes involve an element of intimidation against the community that make its effect go beyond the specific crime and the law needs to recognize that.

wouldn't that also have the same effect of promoting racism/sexism/homophobism?

ASU2003 said This is why we need legislation against hate crimes. Because a jury of peers or a judge may base their findings not just on the crime, but on their own feelings and opinions or maybe on the feeling in a community.