This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 27th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Hate crime legislation winding its way through Congress has already received the stamp of approval from President Obama.

But hate crime laws sacrifice key constitutional protections.

They have a chilling effect on controversial speech.

So says Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on on politicians to posture, to take a stance against hate, and it's an opportunity for them to pass laws and just make themselves look as if they're solving a problem.

And it's a very popular thing to be for, and it's a very popular thing to be for and it's difficult to be against because

you know in a quick sound bite environment it's like why would anybody oppose

hate crimes law but there's lots of reasons to be opposed to this

type of legislation. The number one reason is it's totally unnecessary. Any

violent act that you can think of is already against a law, let me tell you.

And there's already, you know, severe penalties in our law against all types of violence.

So you can get into these hate crimes discussions and get into the

nitty gritty but very quickly you lose sight of the fact that we already have

plenty of laws on the books that prevent all types of violence and the more you get into the

nitty gritty of hate crimes you kind of lose sight of that basic idea.

The argument that is frequently offered is that some crimes when the motivation is learned or

made public has a psychic impact on the community surrounding the commission of this crime.

Well, with respect to some hate crimes, I think that's undeniably true but it's not unique to hate crimes

either there's other other crimes that are motivated by different emotions

jealousy greed what have you that also impacts the wider

community when a child is abducted from a small town.

It's not just that child and his family that's affected.

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