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"If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense."

In response, I'll just quote David Neiwert again (for sources, see the links in my previous post above):

  Throughout the text, they consistently describe hate crimes laws as
  being designed to create special "protected groups," a focus derived
  solely from viewing the special-interest advocacy that often spurred
  these laws' passage. Moreover, they consistently describe the laws as
  protecting only these selected groups and not everyone in society
  equally.

  This is simply a false characterization of the laws themselves. None
  of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims
  -- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the
  perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a
  gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by
  someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only
  logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in
  either case.

  Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are
  victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand
  prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court
  case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting
  a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI
  statistics for yourself.

  Hate-crimes laws generally have three chief categories of bias
  motivation: racial, ethnic and religious. Some statutes include sexual
  orientation, others include gender bias. It's important to keep in
  mind that everyone has a race, an ethnicity, a religion (or even lack
  thereof). Everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender. This is what
  makes the laws generally universal and fully in tune with the
  equal-protection clause.

  ...

  These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and
  there are two components of it that need addressing. ...

  First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes
  are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude
  unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was
  raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching
  legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.

  Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the
  Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws
  that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A
  clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All
  crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in
  Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes
  of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch.

  It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in
  nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from
  second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference
  among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from
  the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference
  between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

  Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes?
  Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

  The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth
  of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate
  victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the
  victim belongs.  Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching
  era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community.
  They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt
  Welch puts it in the post that started this debate:

    So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate
    crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate
    victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond.

  But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from
  their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are
  substantial.  Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston
  University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his
  landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law
  (1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on
  hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my
  arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly
  through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of
  hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in
  most respects, indeed in nearly every detail):

    Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes.
    This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed
    with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve
    physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in
    Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to
    the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for
    crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes
    reported to the police involve assaults.  Secondly, bias-motivated
    crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious
    physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found
    that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults
    suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults
    generally is closer to 30 percent. …

    Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on
    the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on
    the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random
    reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public
    place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the
    victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific,
    personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference].
    Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk
    of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics
    that made him a victim.

    A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the
    very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no
    escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not
    safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of
    one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias
    crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime
    victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm
    associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than
    the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias
    crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as
    depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of
    helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. …

    … Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community.
    Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the
    security of its members and their property but also the shared value
    of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a
    heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound
    violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination
    principle that have become fundamental not only to the American
    legal system but to American culture as well.

  Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their
  parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially
  greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.

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Lawrence points to the distinction between bias crimes and their underlying parallel crimes, which in effect create two tiers of evidence for any kind of hate-crime prosecution to succeed. At both tiers, the criminal's mens rea is an essential component. In the first tier of a crime -- say, an assault -- the intent to commit the crime still must be established; at the second tier, both the first-level intent and the second-tier bias motivation must be proven. For a bias-crime prosecution to succeed, it must establish both tiers of mens rea. Thus someone who merely partakes of hate speech, with no intent to intimidate, is guiltless of a hate crime, because the first tier of motivation is absent, and thus no free-speech rights have been infringed upon. But because menacing and intimidation, all of which in fact take the form of words alone, are punishable crimes in every state, anyone using hate speech to terrorize his neighbors has partaken of a bias crime. Consider, for instance, the example of cross burning. A white supremacist who burns a cross at a private rally is undoubtedly voicing a kind of racial hate, but there has been no attempt to intimidate or menace anyone, and no crime has been committed. Likewise, someone who, say, dumped garbage on a black neighbor's lawn would only be guilty of harassment or intimidation, not a bias crime (unless, of course, evidence existed he had done so because of the neighbor's race). But someone who burns a cross on his neighbor's lawn has clearly committed a hate crime, because he has both the intent to intimidate and racial bias as his motivation. In this sense, hate-crime laws avoid running afoul of the First Amendment in the same fashion as any other of the myriad sentence-enhancement laws, including anti-terrorism statutes, because they all reflect the differences in mens rea among acts that are already established crimes. More to the point, there are limits to free-speech rights; threats and intimidation are already illegal, as are incitement to riot, incitement to murder, and other kinds of speech. And indeed the Supreme Court recently has moved in this direction in upholding the constitutionality of hate-crime laws. The recent cross-burning case, Virginia v. Black, produced a March 2003 ruling (authored by Sandra Day O'Connor) that followed this logic closely. The state of Virginia, the Court said, was well within its rights to outlaw cross-burnings meant to intimidate: The protections the First Amendment affords speech and expressive conduct are not absolute. This Court has long recognized that the government may regulate certain categories of expression consistent with the Constitution. … For example, the First Amendment permits a State to ban "true threats," … which encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. … The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protects individuals from the fear of violence and the disruption that fear engenders, as well as from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur. … Intimidation in the constitutionally proscribable sense of the word is a type of true threat, where a speaker directs a threat to a person or group of persons with the intent of placing the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.

None of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims -- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in either case. Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI statistics for yourself.