James Kirchik has a strange post trashing NRO’s editorial on hate crimes. He takes exception to the last two sentences of this paragraph:

Many proponents of hate-crimes laws profess to have no desire to move against free speech. But we fear that it may be a short jump from prosecuting “hate crimes” to prosecuting “hate speech.” It is true that the law routinely looks into defendants’ motives, and that some motives tend to draw tougher sentences than others. But our social divisions, especially over homosexuality, make it especially dangerous for the law to inquire into defendants’ prejudices—and “prejudices.” We want to deter and punish crimes against blacks, women, homosexuals, and everyone else. But we do not want to open the door to legal punishment for harboring incorrect thoughts about controversial issues—especially when those incorrect thoughts are part of the historic teaching of our major religions.

Kirchik writes: “Presumably, National Review does not mean to imply that there are ‘historic teaching[s] of our major religions’ against blacks and women. What the editors mean is gays.” Well, yes: Note the phrase “especially over homosexuality” in the sentence preceding the two Kirchik quotes.

He continues:

And what are those “incorrect thoughts” that the bill is criminalizing? Not traditionally religious thoughts about homosexuality; these are protected. (After all, there are plenty of people in this country who find homosexuality immoral and don’t lynch homosexuals.) The bill only punishes people whose thoughts about homosexuality veer from mere disapproval to the belief that violence is a suitable recourse. National Review is conflating a passive disapproval of homosexuality with the violent reaction to it.

No, it isn’t. The editorial argues that hate-crimes legislation is dangerous because it could lead to thought-crimes prosecutions. It is a familiar type of slippery-slope argument: “Proposal B may not seem too objectionable but could lead to C, which would be very bad.” Now this argument may be sound or unsound in this case. (Weirdly enough, in this exact post, Kirchik says that he is “hesitant to support hate crimes legislation, for the usual libertarian, ‘thought crimes’ reasons.” I guess this argument is okay as long as it’s not NRO making it.) But the argument doesn’t, and can’t, simply equate B and C.

Kirchik finishes with a flourish:

Of course, the Old Testament, the Koran and other religious works–as fundamentalists anywhere ought to admit–do call for outright violence against homosexuals. Yet many religious conservatives somehow rationalize their “tolerance” of homosexuality while simultaneously condemning it as immoral and destructive. This is theological incoherence, and it is what happens when you base your politics on a religious text.

I can’t see how you can read this other than to express Kirchik’s view that it is “incoherent” to have moral objections to homosexuality while not wanting violence against homosexuals. But there’s nothing incoherent about that view, whatever one thinks of it. It’s Kirchik’s post that doesn’t cohere.