http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...agains_n_314194.html

In general I'm against the idea of "hate crimes" because that criminalizes thought. Does it really make any difference if a person bashes a person over the head with a crowbar if they hated him because of his race/sexual-orientation? The bleeding skull still bleeds...

Calling something a hate crime is almost always waste of breath, in my opinion.

As you said, the skull still bleeds. Say two people get into an argument and one happens to get more irritated and beats the other one up or stabs them. Just a normal crime, right? However, let's say that one person was white and the other was black. It just so happens that the white person beat or stabbed the black person. All of a sudden it's called a hate crime. How does the crime change?

It doesn't.