To Address Sen. Kennedy's "Hate Speech"

To address Sen. Kennedy's 'Hate Speech' amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill: 'Hate Speech' and 'Hate Crimes' are doublespeak straight from George Orwell's representation of life in the Marxist utopia of 1984, where 'thought crimes' caused you to be sent to 're-education' camps. Imagine, the IRS being able to arrest you for thinking about tax loopholes. This is the path Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Gordon Smith would like to put us on. Crime is crime, and freedom of thought and speech is what this country is about.
If a group of rednecks in Texas chain a man to the back of a pickup truck and drag him to death, then all involved should be likewise chained to the back of a pickup and dragged to death. If a group of homies enter an ex-girlfriend's house and beat everyone to death with baseball bats, they too, should be beaten to death with baseball bats. If a couple of cowboys in Wyoming beat a gay man and leave him to die on a barbed wire fence, the same should be done to them. When a group of professional criminals carjack, torture, rape, and murder a young couple in Tennessee, the criminals should be tortured and put to the death in the same fashion. Do you get the point?
Crime is crime.
If you get murdered because a junkie needed a fix, or because someone didn't like your race, you are still DEAD. Your family still mourns. These criminals should be dealt with accordingly. Attaching a 'feel good' tag like 'hate crime' to your murder does nothing but cause animosity; it makes victims in a particular group 'more equal than others' as Orwell put it in Animal Farm. We are a nation of natural rights recognized by The Constitution and The Bill of Rights and a nation of laws passed by Congress. The Civil War, the Suffragists, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and the gay liberation movement were all about ensuring that all people are treated equally under the law. "Hate crime' tilts the balance again, in favor of government interference, to where equality is not present and no one is actually protected, all are suspect. It is the stepping stone to 'hate speech' and then to 'hate thought'. Our 1st amendment protects speech which is unpopular. All the previously mentioned social movements met opposition from people who did not want to here what they had to say. Our founding fathers understood that this country is big enough physically and intellectually for us to discuss and disagree and have the right to do so. Since the success of all these social movements, have we become so much less physically and intellectually that we cannot discuss and disagree? Are we so sensitive that we cannot allow discussions of life style choices or race or religion? Must everyone agree with one extreme or another and no one come to the middle to understand and compromise?
Perhaps the great men of 1776 were wrong and we are not a people who can govern and think for ourselves. Perhaps we all need to be told what to think and do with our lives. That is what Sen. Kennedy and his fellow would be feudal lords, Schumer, Feinstein, Boxer, Smith, Durban, Rodham-Clinton, ad nauseaum, really want, to be able to tell us what to do and for us to do it, like children on Ritalin. Or worse.