[Ghoulish Delight]

I should add that how much the victim or family suffered is somewhat irrelevant to the debate. Criminal justice isn't, and shouldn't be about retribution, or an attempt to assuage the hurt the victim/victim's family feels. This has been shown time and again with regards, specifically, to the death penalty. Very very very few people have, in the long run, said that once a killer is put to death, that they somehow feel vindicated or relieved.

Criminal justice should is about A) punishing the criminal and B) maintaining societal order. An argument can be made (I should mention here that I'm of two minds regarding hate crime legislation) that people who commit violent crimes based on bigoted motives are people who are more likely to commit another violent crime in the future. The thought being that, since their animosity is directed at an entire GROUP of people, rather than some individual grudge, they pose a larger threat and should therefore be kept out of society longer. It's not about making the victim feel better, it's about discouraging and preventing future incidents as much as possible.

I don't know that there's any evidence that such legislation is effective in that aim, but there is some logic there that I can follow, so I'm not ready to entirely dismiss it as a useful tool for long term dampening of the ugly bit of American culture that is literal gay bashing.