> You CANNOT punish someone for what they think whether it's verbalised or not.
Agreed. As stated above, hate crimes do not. They punish actions.
> If people are TRULY equal, there are NO "special" classes of people. All are equal under the law. No one should have more protection than another.
Agreed again. All classes of people are protected equally with hate crimes legislation, as stated above.
Did you not read my post at all? Or are you just not paying attention?
> Your just claiming that motive matters.
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> In my previous example, while "motive" meaning "what did you intend" made the difference, "motive" meaning WHY you did it made no difference in itself.
We are very close to the same page here. I assert that in a correctly-defined "hate crime", two actual crimes are committed: the visible act, and the terrorism (there's no better word!) that is the message the perpetrator wants to pass.
> If your goal is to prevent intimidation, you should pass a law making "intimidation" a crime, separately chargeable. Then if someone commits a murder or arson, and you can prove the purpose was to deprive OTHER people of their rights through intimidation, you could get a separate conviction, rather than simply making the SAME act count as different crimes simply because of the minority status of the victim.
Many hate crime statutes are indeed structured this way. The jury must first find the defendant guilty of the physical crime committed. Then it must retire again to deliberate whether the crime constitutes a hate crime under some carefully controlled definitions. It requires two separate decisions.
No. They don't. They punish for hate which is a THOUGHT.
All classes of people are protected equally with hate crimes legislation, as stated above.
No. They don't. And you're naive to believe otherwise.
Did you not read my post at all? Or are you just not paying attention?
Yeah I read it. Leftist bilge that it is.
But "hate crimes" as generally understood deal with a person's motive for attacking an individual being HATE for that individual, not based on the "motive" being to intimidate others for being the same as that individual.
If someone kills a man because he is black, is he trying to "intimidate" other people to NOT be black? That doesn't make any sense.
If a person burns down Baptist Churches in the hopes that it discourages people from joining the Baptist church, that would be more like what I was talking about (intimidation) then killing a homosexual because you hate homosexuals.
Remembering that I am NOT ENDORSING "intimidation crime" legislation either -- under my definition, you wouldn't get a harsher sentence for killing a gay man just because it could be proven that you don't like gay people.
You would have to prove that a person killed a gay man in order to intimidate other gay people into NOT being gay.
In the classic "hate crimes" case, Matt Shepard was killed. Wikopedea says: "The case is often considered a hate crime because Matthew Shepard was targeted on the basis of his sexual orientation; ".
As you see, nothing to do with an "intimidating effect" on other Gay people. Simply that it was an extra crime since they decided to pick him because he was gay.
There are cases where intimidation is clearly a crime, for example witness intimidation. There are others that have widespread support, like laws preventing the intimidation of minorities who want to freely choose housing, or go into stores.
This is far different from what the "hate crimes" movement is advocating.