On the night of February 19, 1999, in Sylacuaga, Alabama, Steve Mullins asked his friend Charles Butler to help him kill an acquaintance named Billy Jack Gaither. Butler agreed and watched Mullins beat Gaither with an ax handle and burn his body on top of a pile of tires. Shortly after the crime, they turned themselves into the police and admitted to the killing. Both men were convicted of capital murder and received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Although Mullins, a neo-Nazi skinhead, killed Gaither "'cause he was a faggot," the murder did not make the FBI hate crimes report. Alabama's hate crimes law does not apply to crimes motivated by the victim's sexual orientation.

The brutal, anti-gay murders of Gaither and college student Matthew Shepard, who was killed in Wyoming in 1998, provoked a serious reexamination of existing hate crimes law. The current federal hate crimes statute...