Crimes of violence motivated by hatred based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation have always been a part of the American political landscape. At various times legislative efforts have been made to address the problem, such as laws passed in the late 1960s making it a federal crime to interfere violently with black Americans exercising their legal civil rights. In the 1980s, an American society trying to assimilate the changes wrought by the various liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s began to look for stronger ways to show its intolerance for bias-motivated crimes. Defining these crimes as "hate crimes," some groups began to lobby for them to be treated as more heinous than crimes not motivated by the perpetrator's prejudice and to be punished more severely.

Political organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the New York City Lesbian and Gay...