In the best liberal tradition, this newspaper has supported the rights of women, gays and minorities to have the legal protections that Americans unaccustomed to prejudice have long assumed as their birthright. We have editorialized against bias at every turn and supported legislative remedies to many injustices. Which brings us to the issue of hate-crime laws ...

In Congress, Democrats are pushing the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which passed the House by a vote of 237-180 earlier this month. It would expand federal hate-crime categories to include violent attacks against gays and victims assaulted because of their gender or disability. The White House has threatened a veto.

Some readers might assume that we support such legislation, but the Post-Gazette has had long-standing concerns about hate-crime laws. The moves in Congress have our sympathy but not our support. (A similar bill named for Matthew Shepard, a gay college student murdered in Wyoming in 1998, has been introduced in the Senate but has not been voted on.)

Current federal law on hate crimes covers race, color, religion or natural origin and applies to acts of violence against individuals engaged in specific federally protected activities (such as voting). It stipulates tougher penalties for crimes when the offense was motivated by bias against the victim in one of the protected categories.

The legislation would not only extend the law's reach to gender, sexual orientation and disability, but it also would remove from the law the limit of its scope to "federally protected activities." It would also provide federal assistance to states and local jurisdictions to prosecute hate crimes.

In explaining its veto threat, the White House expressed an objection to federalizing a potentially large range of violent crime enforcement, especially as state and local laws already cover the same crimes. That point has some justification.

In Pennsylvania, for example, the state's "ethnic intimidation" statute provides for a new criminal offense, one degree higher in seriousness than the underlying offense, for a person who commits assault, arson, criminal mischief, property destruction or criminal trespass when motivated by hatred toward the actual or perceived "race, color, religion or national origin, ancestry, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity of another individual or group of individuals."

Beyond the practical considerations of the proposed hate crime law, our objection is philosophical. We certainly do not subscribe to the nonsense put forward by the likes of James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, who thinks that this legislation would muzzle condemnations of homosexuality. God knows, some of these people read from a gospel of hate but these bills target crimes, not free speech.

At the end of the day, we are troubled by making distinctions that implicitly give a greater importance to one crime over a similar one simply because of the motivation of the perpetrators (a determination that has a Thought Police aspect to it) or because of how one victim can be categorized demographically.

The same desire that moves us to support equal treatment of all -- men and women, black and white, gay and straight -- also propels us to think that an assault is an assault, a murder is a murder and that crimes should be prosecuted without making invidious distinctions in the eyes of the law, before whom all should stand equal.