Prevent Hate, Legislate?

Someone recently asked what I thought of hate crime legislation. Having absolutely no in-depth knowledge about a subject has never prevented me from voicing an opinion, and this is no exception.

Perhaps an odd view coming from a bleeding-heart liberal, but I think a hate crime is no more and no less than the crime that was committed. Using Matthew Shepard (gay Wyoming student who was tortured and killed in 1998) as an example: If the two men who tortured and killed him did it just because they enjoyed that kind of thing and were completely dispassionate in carrying it out with no feeling about him or his lifestyle—how is it different than if they did it because they hated him, his lifestyle, his race, or the brand of boxer shorts he was wearing? How does mindset make the crime different? Isn't it all about hate of one kind or another since no one commits heinous acts as a rite of goodwill?

Such crimes should certainly elicit punishment to the max—but based on the crime itself, not on the philosophy that was floating around in the perpetrator's pea brain. You can't legislate love. That's my current thinking anyway. If someone can show me that hate crime legislation would actually deter hate crimes—or any crimes for that matter, my opinion just changed.
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After my friend Suzers read this, she emailed me with the following, and I liked the point of view:

I think that the hate crime legislation may be an attempt to eventually get it through the pea brain redneck mind out there that gay-bashing and gay murder is not socially sanctioned. Maybe. Your logic however totally works for me. But maybe someday there might actually be a shift in the collective unconscious....that one southern white boy's supremacist family values will not be destroyed by 2 men holding hands.
Condosuzi