Hate crimes: Include sexual orientation?

[Bowser]

Yes, and now with our witch hunt for terrorist, acts of protest can be classified as acts of terrorism. There is no end to it once we start.

 

[Tiassa]

I also have a problem with people accusing me of hate crimes simply because I am against the legal recognition of gay marriage.

You are correct that it's not a hate crime, except perhaps in an extended human-rights sense. After all, without that sense of human rights, what complaint have we with Saddam Hussein's former brutal regime?

But at the same time, you're arguing that someone should be denied equal protection of the law on the basis of their gender. To tack the word "crime" onto it is extraneous, but whether or not you believe you hate someone, you are indeed advocating a hateful outcome.

I have a problem when people (usually liberals) try to tell me what I hate or don't hate.

And child molesters have a problem when people try to tell them that it's not really love. Dictators and tyrants have a problem when people tell them they're unjust. Liars have a problem when people tell them they're lying.

Not that you're necessarily the equivalent of a child molester, tyrant, or chronic liar, but rather that you seem to reject other people's assessments of how your choices affect them. It's the same argumentative device. You don't seem to think advocating arbitrary exclusion on the basis of gender is hateful, and I assert firmly that it is. The standard you advocate hurts people, and maybe you don't see that, but it looks hateful, sounds hateful, and smells hateful.

At some point a duck is a duck, and there's not much you can do to alter the facts determining its duckhood.