President Barack Obama recently signed a billions-dollars defense appropriations bill. Congress, as with defense spending normally, did not debate the bill, but an attached amendment was very contentious and with good reason. Democrats attached a hate crimes amendment that will make crimes against gays and lesbians a federal offense and thus worthy of more persecution than a crime against non-gays. Liberal Democrats have already passed similar hat crime legislation against other minorities. All of these bills are illiberal.

Of course, crimes against any people are heinous and maybe crimes motivated by prejudice are worse than petty crimes given the mentally thought involved that leads a white supremacist to beat up a black man. But violence is already illegal. If a gay people is beaten up his sexuality is irrelevant to the fact that harm was done to him. Motive is irrelevant and if considered does not entail a minority to a special law that implies that such crimes are worse than offenses against the majority.

Liberals want to stamp out crimes against minorities. Good. But violence, again, is illegal and punishing the thought is Orwellian and unlikely to deter committed thugs. What liberals do through hate crime legislation is make a crime against a, say, black man worthy of my persecution than an affront against a white woman simply because the former is a minority.

This is unAmerican favoritism and it is the antithesis of liberalism. No one is entitled to special persecution simply because the crime is targeting someone of a minority group. And minority here is key since liberalism do not call for equal hate crime bills when blacks attack whites for no other reason than for being white. This fragmentation of society is unhealthy for social cohesion in such a diverse nation as Americans.

It is wrong since the law is no longer indivisible but explicitly states that the wrong done to one is considered more worthy of persecution than an equal or worse crime committed against another. The thought motivating a crime should not warrant special treatment. Hate crime bills are unequal legal codes.

If one is offended by the thought than as James Bovard wrote in “Lost Right,” punish for the crime and allow the criminal to rethink his thought and language in the solitude of a jail cell.