**
I believe you. However, the thing to do in this case is to get the authorities do do their jobs. There is already recourse is, say, a police department is ignoring people claiming to be gay-bashed, for example. And it is already against the law to bet people up - whether they are gay or straight.
Get the police to enforce the laws already on the books.
After all, if cops are ignoring laws that are already on the books anyway, how are new laws that they can equally ignore going to help? And how would saying “take it to the national level” make those local jurisdictions any more accountable (i.e. better)?
**
The law differentiates on whether the crime was premeditated. A guy who plots to kill his wife will be treated differently than the guy who comes home, sees his wife in bed with another man, and lashes out accidentally killing her.
If someone does a crime because the victim is black, gay, or whatever, this shows premeditation (for the most part, individual cases are all different), so what this shows me is that someone who does use hate as a motivation for their actions are simply doing their crimes with premeditation, and they deserve the highest penalties accorded by the law.
Also, the heinousness of a crime is factored into sentences. Someone who killed his wife and tried to get out of town will probably not get as harsh a sentence as someone who chopped his wife into little bits and put her in the garbage disposal. That is human emotional response to something that most people would not find very “human.”
As such, I would like to believe that a crime which was premeditated and this motivation was only an irrational hate, that they would be sentenced to the highest letter of the law. And in jurisdictions where this doesn’t happen, we protest and make as much noise as we can that justice was not served.
But do we need additional laws to make justice? I hope not.
**
True, but those laws attempted to even the playing field, not to cause reverse descrimination. That’s a whole other debate (that we’ve had and will have again), so I don’t want to get into the ramifications of this in practice. However, the fact that some people have made complaints of reverse descrimination (Dubya railed about how "quotas are unamerican at one of the debates) shows me that Hate Crime Legislation would also raise the spectre of this. And if we can do something about the crimes without opening that box, I think that’s a much better course of action.
**
Glad to see you’re right for once. 
Yer pal,
Satan
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