Love for hate crime laws.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Follow-Up

In "What's Hate Got to Do With It?" (December 1992), I argued that enhancing penalties for crimes when they are motivated by bigotry "punish[es] what people say, think, and believe, in violation of the First Amendment." Four months later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously disagreed, upholding a Wisconsin hate crime law on the grounds that it punished not speech, thought, or belief but the act of selecting a victim based on race. By 2009 all but five states had adopted such laws.

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One of the exceptions is Wyoming, a fact that attracted national attention following the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who was robbed, savagely beaten, and left tied to a fence near Laramie. (Robert O. Blanchard considered the anti-Wyoming fallout from Shepard's death in his May 1999 article "The 'Hate State' Myth.") Shepard's attackers already faced a possible death penalty and ultimately received life sentences, so a hate crime law would not have made a difference in that case. The murder nevertheless gave rise to the federal Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a.k.a. the Matthew Shepard Act.

This bill, the latest version of which was approved by the House of Representatives in May and has President Obama's support, would add offenses committed "because of" a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual...