Imagine passing a law that would make the killing of a black man a "lesser crime" than the killing of a white man. Well, welcome to 21st Century Liberal Fascism, where left-wing zealots are doing exactly that - they've merely changed the target of the bigotry.

These Orwellian nitwits want to put into law that crimes are more or less evil based, not on the severity or viciousness of the crime itself, but instead on what the perpetrator may have been thinking, and on the various characteristics of the victim. But there are two fundamentally dangerous problems with such lunacy.

First, such laws criminalize thought. Defendants will no longer be prosecuted for what they actually DID to the victim, but for what they were THINKING while doing it. This is far more dangerous than most people realize. For if we can add an "extra" punishment to any particular offense, just because of what your thought processes were in deciding to commit the crime, then there is absolutely no reason not to proceed to the next step - prosecuting you for the thought processes themselves, whether or not you actually followed through with the alleged crime.

The modern day Brown Shirts of the Left have already been setting the stage for thought crimes laws - attempting to ban all sorts of expressions that they deem "unacceptable." It started with "speech codes" on campuses, and has expanded into such things as banning the Confederate flag on some kid's car (note that a Hamas banner or a Che Guevara t-shirt is considered "free speech").

And now Ted Kennedy has decided to make it a crime to "offend" someone - if he gets his way you could soon be prosecuted not only for what you think, but for what someone else thinks about it!

The second problem with "hate crimes" legislation is that it sets up exactly the kind of government sanctioned bigotry that was the hallmark of the Hitler regime - declaring some citizens more or less equal, based on race, sex (or sexual proclivities) and any other characteristic that they might decide to include. 

Note that we already have a list of "protected classes" - such a term should be abhorrent to anyone who believes in "equal protection under the law" rather than selective protections based on membership in some particular "identity" group.

The result of such radical distortion of the legal system is best illustrated by the following comparison between two hypothetical crimes:

In the first case, a young white male, whose bedroom is decorated with Nazi posters and other such expressions of "white supremacist" thinking, wakes up one day, walks down the street, and encounters a black businessman. The "skin-head" screams a racial slur, then pulls out a gun and shoots the black man in the head, killing him instantly.

In the second case, an "enforcer" (who is black) is hired by a local loan shark to "make an example" of a guy who is behind in his payments. The enforcer kidnaps the deadbeat (who is white), then takes him to an abandoned warehouse. After duct-taping him to a chair, the hired killer proceeds to torture the victim for hours - beating him, using bolt cutters to chop off his fingers and toes, then using a blow torch on him. Finally, the victim is doused with gasoline and set on fire.

Now, any sane person would recognize that the second crime is a far more heinous crime in every way. The victim was subjected to hideous torture (real torture, not water-boarding) and unimaginable suffering for hours before finally being killed in one of the worst way possible - being burned alive.

But guess what. The first crime, in which the victim was instantly shot and killed, would most certainly be classified as a "hate crime" - based on race of the victim, and the supposed motivation of the killer. But the second crime, would NOT be considered a hate crime! After all, the hit-man had no particular "feelings" about the victim at all - he was simply doing a job. Even the guy who hired him was acting only out of financial interest - not any "hatred" for the unfortunate debtor.

Now, most normal, thinking adults recognize that it is the nature of the criminal act that determines its severity - and the second crime was far more horrible by any measure. It is the act itself that matters - not the motivation. True, we may look to motivation in order to determine who may have committed a crime, but not in judging the nature of the crime itself.

And of course, we do consider the nature of the victim in any violent crime - we cannot help being more outraged by the murder of an innocent child than we are by the murder of some drug dealing thug by a gang rival. But we don't encode into law such differences in the "status" of the victim - the crime is still murder.

Mathew Sheppard's death was horrible because he was beaten and left for dead - it is not "more horrible" because he happened to be gay, or because his sexuality may have been the reason for the crime.

We'd best be careful where we tread in such matters. Because when we begin to prosecute people for what they are thinking, or declaring one victim as being entitled to "special protections" over another, we are imperiling the very liberties we should most strongly cherish.