Are Government-Defined “Hate Crimes” Different?
Do Their Victims Suffer More? Last week in Roanoke, Virginia, a man opened fire in what has been described as a gay bar and killed Danny Lee Overstreet and wounded six others. Although crime rates are dropping across the nation, the Roanoke crimes will be among the 400-or-so murders and 12,000-or-so aggravated assaults that will be committed in the Commonwealth of Virginia this year. Some believe that the Roanoke crime was unlike all of the other murders and assaults that have occurred in Virginia, and they want the Roanoke crime to provoke an extraordinary remedy — the passage of a federal “hate-crimes” law. Accordingly, they have begun using the Roanoke shooting as a crowbar to help pry “hate-crimes” language out of the conference on the Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 4205), where it has been parked for a couple of months. President Clinton and Vice President Gore are a part of this effort. The advocates of a federal hate-crimes law know how to leverage the news, even the most trag
