Looking for Hate in All The Wrong Places

Jacob Sullum at Reason opines that with this bill, "justice for all" is neither just nor for all.

Excerpts:

The federal hate crime bill is unnecessary, unjust, and unconstitutional.

"Hate crimes have no place in America," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi boldly declared last week, "no place in a nation where we pledge every morning ‘with liberty and justice for all.'" Pelosi was urging her colleagues to approve a bill aimed at violence motivated by hostility toward members of certain designated groups.

According to Pelosi, then, the "justice for all" mentioned in the Pledge of Allegiance means equal opportunity to be a crime victim. It certainly does not mean equality before the law, which the hate crime bill sacrifices by treating perpetrators of the same crime differently because they hold different beliefs.

...it's not a stretch to say that hate crime laws, by their very nature, punish people for their opinions. A mugger who robs a Jew because he's well-dressed is punished less severely than a mugger who robs a Jew based on the belief that Jews get their money only by cheating Christians. A thug who beats an old lady in a wheelchair just for fun is punished less severely than a thug who does so because he believes disabled people are leeches.

...

The hate crime bill, which authorizes federal prosecution whenever the Justice Department perceives a bigoted motive and believes the perpetrator has not been punished severely enough, continues the unfortunate tendency to federalize crimes that are properly the business of state and local governments, just so legislators like Nancy Pelosi can show they care. Although the Bush administration claims to be concerned about this trend, the details of its objections to the bill (not to mention its history of supporting unconstitutional expansions of the federal government) suggest otherwise.