Orcinus talks about Republican opposition to new hate crime legislation because it “condones the homosexual lifestyle [sic]”.
In reality, punishing a person more harshly for what is in their minds is a standard feature of criminal law, since it directly affects culpability. Bias-crimes statutes recognize, like a myriad criminal laws, that motive and intent can and should affect the kind of sentence needed to protect society adequately — that is, after all, the difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.
Attempting a sort of zero-sum analysis that makes the outcome (in the case of homicide, a dead person) the only significant issue in what kind of sentence a perpetrator should face (the death sentence vs. a prison term) would overthrow longstanding legal traditions of proportionality in setting punishment, effectively eliminating the role of culpability — or mens rea, the mental state of the actor–as a major factor. Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it: “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.”
Moreover, this particular Republican argument against the bill actually argues against any hate- crimes law whatsoever. Someone needs to ask these same Republicans if they wish to overturn all of the nation’s hate-crime laws now.