Not that I wish to curtail references to the Thought Police, because they are a real menace and ever-growing. But it’s at least partly misguided to think that what seperates hate “crimes” is that they’re an intrusion into people’s heads. They are an undue intrusion, but that’s not what makes them special.
For the law has long felt free to jump inside your mind when deciding if and for how long to lock you up, be it to divine intent, to determine whether you’re mentally fit to stand trial, etc. But one thing they’ve never done is criminalized motive. Despite what tv and movies say, and how often it is gabbed about in actual courtrooms, motive is neither here nor there. At best it is a story you tell to the jury, to make them understand better than isolated pieces of evidence can.
But as they probable teach you the first day of law school, or if they don’t they should, it’s the easiest thing in the world to blow up the prosecution’s motive argument. Just demonstrate that people other than the defendant had motives. Which will be true of everyone, because theoretically everyone has a motive to kill everyone they know, and for every murder victim there are maybe a hundred people with the motive to have done it. Which is why, among other things, never in the history of Anglo-American, to say nothing of any other variety, jurisprudence has motive been an element of crime.
Not until, that is, our egalitarian, classless society decided to make special classes out of non-heterosexual white males. This they did for revenge, long, long after Whitey’s monopoly on power ended, and despite the much larger problem of non-white-on-non-white crime.
The argument I always make about the concept of a hate crime is that very few people murder others out of an excess of love.
I think the entire “hate crime” concept is BS. Charge the elements of the crime.