If 'hate laws' are designed to show that it's somehow a worse crime when the victim isn't a hetero-white male, I guess I've been understanding the idea backward.

It has always been a Very Bad Crime when the victim was a white male within a certain category and I thought the idea behind the 'hate crime' label was that it's an equally Bad Crime when the victim is gay, black, a woman, etc.

I never even thought of it as something that Takes Away from anybody. I thought it was an attempt to recognize and validate the notion that ALL of us are worth protecting/defending?

It wasn't so long ago that a man accidentally killing his wife while 'disciplining' was accepted as an unfortunate accident..and a wife who killed her husband was seen as unnatural, uppity and dangerous.
Same crime--unbalanced perception and punishment.

If punishment and perception were equal for all of us and if every person was valued, the hate crime label wouldn't have hatched and the crime of actively seeking gay/black/etc people to hurt would be a form of pre-meditation.

It's horrible for us to need these laws.