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For the sake of argument, let’s agree on those points. If you’re having trouble with the second, just think, "auto emissions testing."

Now recall for a moment the teen-ager whose brown eyes peeked out from page B1 of the Nov. 17 Enquirer.

Her name was Sara Krug, and she lives in Anderson Township. She couldn’t face going to school on Monday. Over the weekend, somebody has defaced her home with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans.

Ms. Krug, 15, is Jewish. Other homes on her street also were vandalized, but none with messages like these.

"I just didn’t want to deal with this at school," she told an Enquirer reporter. The week before, a classmate at Anderson High had said she should die and rot because of her religion, she said.

Back to the first point for a moment.

If statistics are generally useless, those on "hate crimes" are especially so. What is a hate crime, anyway?

Congress came up with a definition in its 1990 Hate Crimes Statistics Act, but people keep arguing over the details, such as whether homosexuals should be included in the list of potential victims.

The FBI has spent countless hours training police to recognize hate crimes and report them. In ‘96, it received data from about 66 percent of 17,000 law enforcement agencies. Even if every agency submits numbers for ‘97, comparisons will be irrelevant because of low participation in previous years.

So forget about official statistics. What we have left are anecdotes from people like Sara Krug, reports in local newspapers, evidence scrawled across houses or burnt on front lawns.

These are real crimes, and they go beyond vandalism or simple assault. They scream at entire groups of people with the explosive combination of words and action.

Generally, hate expressed through words alone must be protected. We cannot - must not - selectively delete from the mosaic of opinions in this country.

Free speech is a powerful weapon. Use it. But understand that when such speech is accompanied by criminal activity, our legal system must make a response commensurate with the message delivered by the crime.

This means states should recognize hate crimes and allow for stiffer penalties against those who commit them. Kentucky’s General Assembly this year took the first step, allowing Wait a minute, say opponents. We can’t punish one vandal more severely than another simply because the first happened to draw a swastika while smashing windows. Maybe the second guy ran out of paint.

In reality, our legal system does not consider all killings alike. We have involuntary manslaughter, reckless homicide, first-degree murder - a whole smorgasbord of intentions and penalties.

Recognizing the special danger of hate crimes is akin to doing the same with assaults against police officers.

Just as an assault against a cop is an assault against authority that represents society, the hate criminal symbolically attacks more than just an individual, wreaking havoc on the social fabric of a nation.

Let me offer a hypothetical based on a true story.

Some years ago, a friend of mine got some horrific news: Her brother had been shot and killed while driving down a highway in Florida.

Apparently, he had passed another car in a way that irritated the driver. This car pulled alongside my friend’s brother, and someone in the car shot him in the head.

The shooter wasn’t charged with murder because prosecutors couldn’t prove he intended to kill. He was convicted of a "lesser" homicide and given lesser sentence.

Setting aside this outrage for a moment, let’s pretend the killer was a white man and my friend’s brother African-American. Imagine that, just before firing, the killer uttered a racial slur.

Imagine the upheaval in the community. The shooter not only leaves two children without a dad, and a wife without a husband, but also frightens thousands who share the victim’s color.

This should be grounds for an enhanced penalty.

Now to Point No. 2 - over-regulation.

Hate crimes ought to be punished, but no by federal edict. The last thing we need is more bureaucrats from Washington fanning across the country, showing local people how to carry out laws.

Hate-crime legislation is a task for state governments, and many already have done it. I suggest states should follow the principle of Zero Regulation Growth. For every new law passed, and old and stupid one must be eliminated.

Here’s where we could start: Thirteen states in the union say it’s a crime to slander a rutabaga. Let’s get rid of the vegetable defamation laws.