Are you aware of the actual content of hate crime laws?

I’m watching Mike Huckabee discuss Barack Obama’s radical leftist gay agenda, and the his discussion of hate crime laws was certainly an inventive interpretation. To quote,

“What we’re really prosecuting is thought… I should be prosecuted if I hit you. I’m not sure I should be prosecuted for being a jerk and I hate you. I have a right to be a jerk and a right to be an idiot, but I don’t have a right to act upon it and to actually take it out in the form of physical violence.”

How many Flutherers understand hate crime laws as such—that you can be charged with a crime for hating a protected class of people?

I’m not trying to incite debate, just to find out what people actually think hate crime laws are. I think that actually debating the laws is nonsensical if nobody actually knows what they are.

Bonus: do you know anything about how hate crimes are charged and prosecuted?