Last year, my colleague Marjorie Cortez came up with the best response to that one. Lots of laws on Utah's books already do just such a thing, she wrote. If you assault a pregnant woman, you will serve more time than if you assaulted an un-pregnant one, regardless of her age. If you hit a school employee or a police officer or a doctor, you'll serve more time than if you hit a newspaper writer, even though we all might feel the same pain.

If you're a really bad person and you kill a political candidate, and it can be proved in court that you did so because of the victim's "position, act, capacity or candidacy," the law requires the charge against you to be capital murder. The same goes for a long list of public officials. Kill a regular person and the charge could be less severe.

The point is that there is a difference between killing someone because they stand between you and a cash register and killing someone because they hold a position that represents civilized society itself. Lawmakers always have understood this.

Similarly, there is a difference between an ordinary crime and one intended to make an entire class of people scared. It is a separate type of crime for which separate penalties should apply.

The second objection is that a hate-crimes law would punish thoughts. Perhaps, but no more so than when a judge or jury has to decide whether a murder was premeditated or whether someone attacked a candidate because the person was a candidate.

(A third common objection is that there is no such thing as crime that is not done out of hate, but that is ridiculous on its face. A meth addict who ransacks your home doesn't hate you any more than does any other stranger.)

Litvack says his aim is to at least give victims an official acknowledgment that the humiliation they suffered was more than just vandalism or assault or some other category of crime.

I can't imagine the real reason lawmakers might reject this watered-down version.

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Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com