In 1998, Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming. No, he was not part of any crime organization; in fact he didn't have many personal enemies at all. He was murdered because he was gay.
This triggered many new hate crime laws to be passed, and also got Moises Kaufman to take members of his Tectonic Theater Project, to interview people in Laramie. He developed "The Laramie Project", a play about the story of Matthew Shepard.
What is a hate crime? Is it a crime committed with hate involved, or is it a crime committed because of hate. This has been the government's difficult job to determine. Some of the new hate crime laws were defined in the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2000. This also gave the most widely accepted definition of a hate crime. A hate crime is defined by the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act of 2000 as, "An additional (felony) charge added to a criminal offense against persons (or property) motivated by hate or bias against the victim(s) due to race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, disability, or sexual orientation." But what does this mean?.
In the 1980's there was no such thing as a hate crime. The government just considered crimes to be crimes, regardless in hate was involved. The only things that were considered hate crimes are killing done by a group because they hate another group, like the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis in World War II. .
Is it a crime to hate someone? If I decided I hated people in wheelchairs, but never acted on it, would that be a crime? In the stated definition of a hate crime, no, this wouldn't be a crime, because a felony already must exist. But what if I held demonstrations against people in wheelchairs? This may hurt their feelings, but I am not doing any physical harm to them. According to the definition, this would not be a crime because holding demonstrations isn't a criminal offense. .
These are some of the difficult choices the government must make.
