Although the headline for Jeff Jacoby’s column, “Racist opinions aren’t crimes,’’ is certainly true, Jacoby’s logic — that hate crime laws punish racist motivations as if they were crimes — is erroneous. Hate crime laws punish the criminal acts, not their hateful motivations. When no criminal act occurs, those expressing hateful attitudes are generally free from legal consequences. Certainly, if hate crime laws were violations of free speech, by now they would have been struck down on constitutional grounds.

Elevating penalties to reflect the level of egregiousness of a crime motivated by hate is no different than elevating penalties based on the degree of criminal intent. For example, the law provides for more severe sentencing for a person who committed murder with premeditation than for a person responsible for an unintentional death due to their negligence.

Now, Jacoby may also object to this correct characterization of hate crime laws. However, in doing so, he would also be overlooking the history of such laws’ development as a remedy to America’s shameful past, when people of particular demographics freely injured or killed those of others simply because of hateful attitudes, and America’s problematic present, in which such crimes are still not prosecuted consistently, even given the protections that hate crime laws are meant to provide.

Hated lives matter.

James L. Sherley

Boston