So President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which by some weird circumstance also includes hate crime legislation.

Now, I'm no fan of hate. Hate, in all forms, is ugly, even when performed by beautiful people (that's a shout out to Stephanie Von Pratt, who turned me down for my senior prom). But here's what I don't get: if I kill someone, I'm a killer. But hate crime law says that I also broke a new law - one that has to do with my thoughts when I committed the crime. So it's a thought crime more than a hate crime.

Now, I'm not into semantics, and I can barely read, so I don't want to get too deep into this. But if I were to kill my co-host Bill Schulz, whether I hated him or not, that's a crime. But, if we find out later that he was a sequential hermaphrodite, one might say it could be a hate crime.

Now compare that to black on black crime. According to the Bureau of Justice, in 2005, murder victim rates for blacks were 6 times higher than rates for whites. In that same year, offending rates for blacks were 7 times higher than rates for whites. But according to hate crime law, all that black death means less because there was no bigotry behind it. To me, murder is murder, no matter the identity.

And, what of terrorists? Does the fact that they hate us make their crimes worse? Not to them - punishment is meaningless. Which is the real truth about hate, anyway. Hate crime laws won't stop hate, or crime.

Fact is, focusing on the killer's outlook diminishes the victim. It's no longer Bill Schulz is dead, but "Bill Schulz, the sequential hermaphrodite, is dead." Humanity should come before identity.

See, we need to see people as people, not as part of groups. We know bigotry is bad. But murder - in any form - is so substantially worse that it needs no footnote.

And if you disagree with me, you're probably a racist.