Sentence All Crimes Equally

There can be no question of the deplorable nature of all hate-motivated crime, particularly violent acts as in the case of Matthew Shepard.

Unfortunately, however, the staff fails to realize that in mandating hate-crime legislation, they seek to punish not simply the illegal act of the given crime, but the ideas that motivate it, attacking the legally-protected right to free thought and expression.

An act of vandalism, for example, can only be illegal because it infringes on another person's property, not because of its intellectual content.

The perverse reality of the American Bill of Rights is that government cannot punish us for our beliefs or our expression of them, even if those ideas are utterly contemptible.