This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

No person's liberty, religious or otherwise, is threatened by the latest attempt to repeal Utah's flawed hate-crimes law and replace it with a statute that could actually be enforced.

Unless, of course, someone wants to argue that some concept of liberty, religious or otherwise, includes a "right" to beat people bloody for the sin of being different.

Not that anyone is arguing that.

But whenever the question comes up in Utah, it is certain that someone will waive the bloody shirt of religious freedom as a way to stop, slow or distract from a bill that would impose tougher sentences on those who commit crimes with the intent of harming one person and threatening all those who share one or more particular characteristics.

Thus did our friends from the Sutherland Institute predictably say that they were suspicious of a bill to impose more serious penalties for some kinds of crime unless, in return, the Legislature did something to enhance religious freedom in the state.

Sutherland's Derek Monson was straightforward in saying that the concern was not so much that there was anything wrong with Sen. Daniel Thatcher's bill. What seemed to worry him is that to allow the bill to go forward without some compensating offer to those who fear that religious freedom is threatened — somehow, by someone — is not the tit for tat that has become a habit in our Legislature.

What threats to religious freedom may be abroad in our land, and what the Legislature might do to ease them, doesn't seem to matter as much as a perception that no one gets a bigger piece of the pie.

Abandoning that "balance," Monson argues, only inflames the culture wars.

Maybe. Maybe it is Sutherland, not the proposed bill, that keeps the flames alight. At least on this issue.

Thatcher, R-West Valley City, will carry his Senate Bill 72 — Victim Selection Penalty Enhancements — into the legislative session that begins next week. It would replace the state's unenforceably vague hate crimes law with a measure that has withstood constitutional challenges in other states.

Such laws treat acts that are clearly crimes — assault, arson, vandalism — as more serious, and deserving of more severe punishments, if a prosecutor can prove that a perpetrator intended to single out a victim because of a characteristic such as religion, race, gender or orientation.

And not only a minority religion, race, gender or orientation. An act of violence that singled out a straight, white, male Mormon for the purpose of frightening all other straight, white, male Mormons, would carry the same legal weight as a violent act against a gay, black, female Satanist.

Such a measure should enhance, rather than threaten, religious freedom in Utah. If there are other steps to take in that realm, by all means, let us hear about them.

But Thatcher's bill should pass.