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Google the words "hate crimes" and you will find that there are 21 million sites dealing with the issue. A relatively recent legal concept (in the last 20 years), its most famous examples probably are the 1998 murders of James Byrd and Matthew Sheppard. Byrd, who was black, was brutally dragged to his death behind a pickup truck outside Jasper, Texas. Sheppard, a Wyoming homosexual, was bound to a fence and beaten to death. In both cases, the prosecution sought to make motives, not actions, the issue.

A hate crime normally is defined as "a crime that is motivated by hate, prejudice, or intolerance of another person's race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation." By that definition, the murders of James Byrd and Matthew Sheppard would seem to be classic hate crimes.

So when Matthew Cloyd, Russell DeBusk and Benjamin Mosely were arrested for burning nine Alabama churches, why was this not another textbook example? Apparently, we are supposed to believe that this was just a joke, a prank committed by three bored college students. That is the claim they are making, a claim being blindly accepted by authorities and dutifully reported by the media.

Why are these three malicious young malcontents not being charged with nine hate crimes? Is the burning of nine churches, all of them Southern Baptist, not a hateful act? Is this not a hate crime perpetrated against a particular group of people of a particular religious belief? Of course it is. So why would officials be so quick to accept the idea that this is merely a "prank?" If nine synagogues were burned to the ground, would authorities not consider it a hate crime? What about nine mosques? And if nine gay bars were firebombed, does anyone seriously doubt for a moment that there would be a federal civil rights prosecution culminating in hate crimes charges? So why is the destruction of Baptist churches not considered to be every bit as serious?

This isn't the first time that the act of burning churches failed to produce hate crimes charges. When Jay Scott Ballinger, a self-described Satanist, confessed to burning two dozen churches in the mid-to-late-1990s, even his heinous acts were not classified as a violation of hate crime laws. Why? Can a man calling himself "a missionary of Lucifer" possibly commit such acts against Christian churches out of any other motive? This was a man openly hostile to Christianity. When neo-Nazis or skinheads commit violent acts toward blacks or Jews, no one ever questions that their actions were motivated by hate. But when a self-proclaimed Satanist attacks a Christian church, that is somehow different?

It seems that only members of minority groups or minority religions can be victims of hate crimes. Christians, on the other hand, are fair game for the most egregious violations and it is considered to be "just a prank." Who are we kidding here? This reasoning is reminiscent of the concept that there can be no racism by black people against white people because racism is a matter of one group exerting power over another, and since blacks are a minority they can't exert that power over whites.

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