In fact, no American criminal law targets an individual’s speech at all—unless it is meant to intimidate or harass.  Threatening and harassing speech is not protected under the constitution of the United States; instead, it is considered criminal behavior.  There is an immense difference between a minister stating to his congregation, “Homosexuality is a sin and homosexuals are sinners”, and that same minister saying to a specific gay person, “I’m going to kill you, you homosexual, because you are a sinner.”  The former is protected free speech in the United States, whereas the latter in most states is a hate crime.  One can see clearly in this example that hate crime laws punish illegal acts.  They don’t make beliefs or thoughts illegal.  Freedom of speech is not restricted by hate crime laws in the United States.  The idea that hate crime legislation limits free speech is very often bandied about as an argument for opposing such laws—shockingly even by some whose socio-demographic characteristics place them at a higher risk of being a hate crime victim than the general public.*  What’s informative about such arguments is what is not reported by the people making them.  Opponents of hate crime laws have never pointed to a state or federal American hate crime law that was deemed unconstitutional by an American court because it eroded free speech.  Why?  Because no such court cases exist.  Why not?  Because hate crime laws do not curtail our constitutional right to free speech, including religious expression.  To date 45 states have bias-motivated crime statutes, many that protect persons from sexual-orientation based hate crimes, yet none of these laws have prevented anyone from condemning homosexual behavior (or homosexual people) from the pulpit or elsewhere—unless they did so in the commission of a crime.  No American has been charged with a hate crime for merely voicing homophobic beliefs.

What’s ironic (and hypocritical) about the false argument that hate crime laws inhibit people from being able to speak openly about their religious beliefs is that the most vocal people who oppose expanding hate crime laws do not at all oppose current hate crime laws.  These religious individuals—who think it is wrong to expand the federal hate crime law to protect Americans due to sexual orientation-based criminal acts—never call for repealing existing hate crime laws, ones that protect Americans from being victimized based on their religion.  They know they’re protected under the current federal statute, but they don’t want specific groups of people to be.  They distort the reality of who are (and who are likely to be) bias-motivated crime victims and they work to control who they believe should be called a hate crime victim and who should not.  The bottom line is this:  hate crime laws are not about criminalizing the words or thoughts of the citizenry, they are about penalizing the actions of the criminal. Even the American Civil Liberties Union endorsed a 2007 hate crimes bill lauding it as "more protective of free speech than any other criminal law in the entire U.S. code." Yet, even with the endorsement from the ACLU, this amendment unfortunately was defeated.
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*Homosexual writer/blogger for theAtlantic.com, Andrew Sullivan, voiced this view online on May 3, 2007 in his theAtlantic.com article titled, “Hate Crimes and Double Standards”.  Like others who voice identical opinions, Mr. Sullivan never explains how hate crime laws curb free speech.