Saving the Afghan War with Hate Crimes Legislation

Say what? How do you connect the dots between the Afghan war and hate crimes? Easy, if you're a Democrat:

What does a hate crimes bill have to do with money for U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Nothing, except that the National Defense Authorization Act, which will win final passage in Congress and be sent to the president's desk this week, also contains the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which Democrats placed inside the defense measure over Republican objections.

The crime bill -- which would broaden the protected classes for hate crimes to include sexual orientation and "gender identity," which the bill defines as a victim's "actual or perceived gender-related characteristics" -- passed the House earlier this year as a stand-alone measure. But it's never had the votes to succeed by itself in the Senate. So over the summer Democrats, with the power of their 60-vote majority, attached it to the defense bill.

Republicans argued that the two measures had nothing to do with each other. Beyond that, GOP lawmakers feared the new bill could infringe on First Amendment rights in the name of preventing broadly defined hate crimes. The bill's critics, including many civil libertarians, argued that the hate crimes provision could chill freedom of speech by empowering federal authorities to accuse people of inciting hate crimes, even if the speech in question was not specifically related to a crime.

Just watch what comes out of this. All sorts of speech, from actual verbal statements to columns to blog posts will suddenly be classified as hate speech if the subject matter doesn't toe the line of political correctness and liberal ideology. The threat alone will be enough to chill some speech and the First Amendment will be weaker because Democrats believe it only applies to speech of which they approve.