“This bill is an egregious example of liberal overreach.” any specifics?

Because it changes to law to make some people more deserving of victim-hood than others.

“We will also have codified crime based on thought if this bill passes” How so?

That is evident from the article. I can’t help it if you are not too swift.

“Are we going to include pedophelia in this? If not, why not?” Pedophelia is illegal, being queer is not (not yet anyway) that’s why!

So is assault, that is sort of the whole reason for this brua ha ha, you are punishing similar crimes in different ways.

“Call your Senators and tell them to vote no” Yeah I’m gonna call senators Vitter and Ensign and tell them to stand up for traditional values!

The presence of hypocrites in no way invalidates the thing that those hypocrites may have championed. Your attitude is childish.

“The only question is what you think ought to be done about it.”

Try nothing because there isn’t anything TO do “about it.” Violent crime is ALREADY against the law. There is no more “worse” to it.

Oh, and, I find it interesting that you don;t mind if pedophelia is legal. That is pretty sick of you, don’t you think?

then why pass it? Some things are already illegal to do, so why not just keep them that way? What is the POINT?

See, here’s the ugly little secret about this: by assessing punishment BASED ON THOUGHT, what they do is open the door to rendering those thoughts illegal? How? Pretty easily, actually. It’s almost as simple as math. Try this:

Assault is illegal. Let’s say it carries a penalty of 3 years. I’m not a lawyer, and I haven’t checked to see, so let’s just go with my assumptions for the sake of argument.

Through an assessment of the charge as a “hate crime” — something that can ONLY be a subjective judgement, by the way (for example, what if a person hates gay people, but only assaulted the victim to get his wallet? Do you or don’t you charge him with a hate cime?) — further penalties are assessed to add 2 years.

did the victim bleed more because of the assailant’s motive? Is he somehow MORE vicimized in this particular instance? (Man, this WOULD have only rated a seven on the pain scale, but since he hit me because I’m gay, it’s an ELEVEN!).

So what we’ve done then, is take a three-year crime and, based on WHY it happened, make it a 5-year crime. That means the convict gets three years for the assault, and two years for hating the guy before punching him.

So, though the bill doesn’t actually make hate, in and of itself, a crime, it penalizes you for it. This sets a precedent that hate is, in fact, punishable by law.

Others here have argued regarding the slippery slope of criminalizing throught. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to criminalize hate, or at least use it to extend sentences, which then makes it an incremental crime. We still have serious equal protection process.

1) First, only certain groups of people or attributes are protected against “hate”. So gender identity is protected but being a veteran is not, for instance. A black is protected but not a white, and probably other groups such as Pacific Islanders.

So it’s not the concept of hate that you want to penalize, only hate directed against certain politically connected identity groups. And if you don’t belong to such a group, you’re out-of-luck.

2) Second, there’s the issue of quantitating the hate, or determining what is the threshold level. How many e-mails, group memberships, hearsay conversations, etc. will be the trigger point for saying that this person actually has “hate” as opposed to say discomfort or a bad sense of humor. Or dislike or moral objection - this is all subjective and is likely to depend on the identity of the accused and the political clout of his identity group (Baptist vs. Musliim vs. white Catholic vs. ethnic Catholic vs. Black Muslim).

And particularly when this hate crime enhancement will be at the discretion of the prosecutor, we’re going to see community pressure and intimidation come into play - where again the identity group of the accused will have an undue influence on the case disposition. Another unblinding of justice.

3) Then there’s the question of tying the hatred to the victim - even say if the person has a hatred towards gays, etc., was this hatred operative during this crime. Was the accuser even aware of whether the victim was gay or was this coincidence. And at what point does the hatred kick-in in terms of premeditation. And how much of this will be inference vs. actual evidence. Or how sympathetically the victim can be drawn.

4) And how will we keep the burden of proof on the prosecution side. Especially if the crime itself produces revulsion, how will a jury be able to separate it’s revulsion at the crime from the issue of hate enhancement - or will it just be a way to throw the book, or for the prosecutor to lower the evidence level for the actual crime (i.e. this is a hateful guy, therefore his likelihood of having the crime is higher by virtual of that hatred).