"If you knife a person, it is a crime regardless of who the victim is unless it was in self defense."

In response, I'll just quote David Neiwert again (for sources, see the links in my previous post above):

Throughout the text, they consistently describe hate crimes laws as
being designed to create special "protected groups," a focus derived
solely from viewing the special-interest advocacy that often spurred
these laws' passage. Moreover, they consistently describe the laws as
protecting only these selected groups and not everyone in society
equally.

This is simply a false characterization of the laws themselves. None
of these laws specify the race or ethnicity or religion of the victims
-- rather, they are focused solely on the motivations of the
perpetrator. A person need not be actually gay to be the victim of a
gay-bashing hate crime; he need only have been perceived as gay by
someone who specifically set out to assault homosexuals. This is only
logical, since the terroristic motivation of the assault is present in
either case.

Moreover, the laws protect everyone equally. Majority whites are
victims of bias crimes too, and every year there are over a thousand
prosecutions for such cases. (Indeed, the definitive Supreme Court
case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, involved a black man accused of fomenting
a hate crime against a couple of white teens.) Check the FBI
statistics for yourself.

Hate-crimes laws generally have three chief categories of bias
motivation: racial, ethnic and religious. Some statutes include sexual
orientation, others include gender bias. It's important to keep in
mind that everyone has a race, an ethnicity, a religion (or even lack
thereof). Everyone has a sexual orientation and a gender. This is what
makes the laws generally universal and fully in tune with the
equal-protection clause.

...

These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and
there are two components of it that need addressing. ...

First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes
are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude
unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was
raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching
legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.

Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the
Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws
that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A
clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All
crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in
Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes
of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch.

It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in
nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from
second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference
among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from
the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference
between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes?
Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth
of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate
victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the
victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching
era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community.
They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt
Welch puts it in the post that started this debate:

So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate
crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate
victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond.

But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from
their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are
substantial. Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston
University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his
landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law
(1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on
hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my
arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly
through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of
hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in
most respects, indeed in nearly every detail):

Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes.
This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed
with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve
physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in
Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to
the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for
crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes
reported to the police involve assaults. Secondly, bias-motivated
crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious
physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found
that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults
suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults
generally is closer to 30 percent. …

Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on
the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on
the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random
reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public
place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the
victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific,
personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference].
Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk
of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics
that made him a victim.

A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the
very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no
escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not
safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of
one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias
crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime
victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm
associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than
the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias
crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as
depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of
helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. …

… Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community.
Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the
security of its members and their property but also the shared value
of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a
heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound
violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination
principle that have become fundamental not only to the American
legal system but to American culture as well.

Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their
parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially
greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.