Two arsonists are walking around town looking for a suitable house to burn down. One ends up selecting a particular house because it is a bit more convenient to get to than those nearby. The other ends up selecting a particular house because the family who lives in it is black. Both are caught, convicted, and punished for their acts. The men live in a state that has a hate crime law. Such laws treat what the second arsonist does as worse than what the first arsonist does. As a result, the second arsonist receives a greater punishment than the first.

Many people are troubled by hate crime laws. And many of those who are troubled by them are troubled for largely the same reasons that they’re troubled by hate speech restrictions. As Dinseh D’Souza has put it in lumping the two cases together, for example, “free speech is subordinated to the goals of sensitivity and diversity, as in so-called hate speech and hate crimes laws.” These are people who will largely agree with what I said about hate speech restrictions in Chapters 6 and 7, but who will think that I haven’t yet gone far enough. The reasons for rejecting hate speech restrictions, they’ll say, are also reasons for rejecting hate crime laws.