First, in 1992 the United States Supreme Court (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377) unanimously struck down a local ordinance—the Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance of St. Paul, Minnesota—because in part it did not ban all actions that—to paraphrase the ordinance—aroused anger, alarm, or resentment, but only those that did so on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender, but only certain actions (as Justice Scalia explained, “The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.”).  This likely has led some people to erroneously believe that hate crimes laws violate the constitution’s right to free speech when, in fact, they don’t.  In fact, in June, 1993 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Wisconsin’s hate crime law in Wisconsin  v. Mitchell (508 U.S. 476) in a unanimous decision allowing it to not only consider whether someone committed a crime because of the victim’s membership in a protected class, but also to impose sentence enhancement in bias-motivated crimes arguing that Wisconsin had a compelling interest in preventing the negative secondary effects of such crimes. 

Second, and probably more importantly, some so-called Christian groups have reported falsely to each other, to the media, and to anyone who visits any of a number of their internet websites that hate crime laws take away their right to denounce homosexuality such that mainstream media sources have come to believe it without questioning the veracity of those claims (fact-checking is required for journalistic integrity, but it’s non-existant when the false claims of organized homophobes make it into mainstream media news reports).  As just one example of many, Knoxville, Tennessee NBC news affiliate WBIR reported on its website (WBIR.com) on March 9, 2008, an Associated Press “news” story that read as follows: “Christian broadcasters are being warned they could face prosecution if a proposed hate crimes measure is signed into law by the next president. At the National Religious Broadcasters convention, NRB president Frank Wright said that under a measure that Senator John McCain helped defeat last year, it could become a hate crime to say that homosexual behavior is sinful or that non-Christian religions are false.”  Nothing could be further from the truth, as we’ve described, but when stories like this flourish in multiple broadcasting markets, then people will begin to believe that hate crime laws squelch free speech.