about hate crime laws -- or rather, it would be a good question if enforcement of these laws in any way resembled the code sections that support them, or the rules applying to other types of enhancements.

But they don't. To understand hate crime law, you have to understand the deeply politicized and biased ways police and prosecutors are trained to enforce them -- training provided by taxpayer-funded but privately run non-profits that have no business imposing their agendas on the rest of us.

I used to be a member of the "hate crimes community." Early on, I walked away, shocked by the types of discussions I heard, things like: "what happens if too many young black men get accused of hate crimes? How do we prevent that from happening?" and "Too many women are targeted precisely because they are women. If we count them, they'll overwhelm the statistics. How do we prevent them from counting?"

How they prevented it is what you see today: prosecutors and police officials (not beat cops) applying ridiculously different standards to different victim-groups (and the "gender" category, in practice, is reserved for non-biologically-born females, transvestites, trans-sexuals, cross-dressers). The real intent of these laws is to manufacture a negatively nostalgic picture of America in which white males are a categorical danger, and racism, homophobia and other biases eternally threaten in a "rising tide of hate." Selective prosecution is crucial to this cause.

Real crime statistics remain, as they always have, primarily internecine -- both racially and class-based so, though the latter is not often acknowledged.

The hate crimes movement is not merely an "extra protection" for some groups: it is damaging, resource-wise, to victims who don't fall into the categories activists choose to enforce. Consider the issue of gender. In one case in Georgia, a transvestite prostitute was beaten and died from her wounds. Investigators were tasked with trying to figure out of the offender had known he was killing a transvestite prostitute or just killing a female prostitute, which wouldn't be hate. The activists geared up for the former scenario (and the feminists screwed shut their traps about the grotesque incongruity of the distinction, knowing full well that being welcome at the hate crimes table meant selling out those "too prevalent" female victims. In another case, a rapist was charged with more serious offenses for seven of his eight victims who were either Asian or appeared Asian to him. The eighth rape, of a white female, was a lesser charge. The fact that he targeted women, of course, didn't count as hate.

None of this is an issue of whether there are hate crime laws on the books in different states, or certain categories of victims counted in -- the real power of the hate crimes movement is to push resources and media attention towards selected cases. And their stable of activist-apologists control the press to the point that even the Pittsburgh gym killer -- who left a written record of rage against women -- wasn't called a hate criminal in the news. This is pure ideology, advocacy imposed on our purportedly egalitarian justice system.

Because we have strong free speech laws (OK, thank you, ACLU), the hate crimes movement here has moved towards street crime, creating real stretches like "hate crime car jacking," rather than focusing on speech acts, as it has in other countries (to terrible and instantly damning effect, such as Canada's "Human Rights Tribunals" show-trials).

Interestingly, as the hate crimes movement was busy trying to create protected groups, feminists and gay activists were moving in precisely the opposite direction with sex crime laws, cleaning up state codes so that all victims (and perpetrators) of rape would be treated equally, regardless of their gender! The result there, impressively, has been moving a step closer to equal justice for all. This example might also help explain to Mr. Snyder how the categories established by these laws are actually different from distinctions made based on premeditation or passion in murders, for example. However, I think there is a good argument for counting targeting cops as an aggravating factor: there the enhancement recognizes that police proactively must enter dangerous situations on behalf of the public, so making the stakes higher is about public safety.

because it keeps its women's issues tucked away under and to the side of the Life section, leaving News & Politics and Opinion for the important men and their important subjects -- such as Garrison's Keillor's piles.

Conservative feminists and their allies are neither rushing into this issue nor piling onto you. Character assassination only works if it is grounded in fact.

While idiots like Wolf peer into the wan mirror of modern feminism -- seeing only narcissistic reflections of their own misguided sexual fixations -- the Feminist Right has been defending women's international human rights -- you know, the ones that do not confuse justice with the alluring smell of one's own hair.

This is neither new nor conspiratorial, but even if it were both, it would have the identical effect: defending women's international human rights.

And to that hair-smelling thing, since it's doubtless central to many here:

"I remember a leading American female journalist, at the time of the 1979 Revolution, saying that she felt sexier in a chador than in a miniskirt. Believe me, she wasn’t."

Michael Ledeen