From Robert Knight on the proposed “hate crime” legislation (Human Events):

The proposed federal hate crime law, like all hate crime laws, politicizes crime, leading to pressure on police and prosecutors to devote more of their limited resources to certain victims at the expense of others. For example, homosexual activist groups descended on Wyoming and created a media circus around the Matthew Shepard case, costing the state heavily for public relations. Meanwhile, the story of Kristin Lamb, an eight-year-old girl who a month before Shepard’s death was killed in Wyoming and her body thrown into a landfill, received virtually no news coverage or concerns about a possible “hate crime.”

Hate crime laws lay the groundwork for assaults on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In Canada, Great Britain and Sweden, clergy have been investigated and arrested for advocating traditional morality.

“Hate crime” laws are already being used to silence people in the United States. A pastor in New York’s Staten Island saw two billboards with a Bible verse on them taken down in 2000 under pressure from city officials, who cited “hate crime” rhetoric.

In Philadelphia, 11 Christians were arrested and jailed overnight for singing and preaching in a public park at a homosexual street festival in 2004. Five of them were bound over and charged with five felonies and three misdemeanors, totaling a possible 47 years in jail. These charges, based on Pennsylvania’s “hate crimes” law, hung over them for months until a judge finally dismissed them.