Hate crime

"I'm subjected to abuse several times a week whilst cycling"

Where and how are you cycling?

I cycle every day in London with thousands of others and almost never see anyone being abused.

Conversely, a friend recently started cycle commuting in a US city and was yelled at regularly.

Removing religion would enhance our legal system as it would remove a number of burdens and contradictions. A lot of cases would be handled at lower courts instead of having to go all the way to the ECJ. Think religious items like crosses and veils which keep getting banned or unbanned. Think there was an ECJ case this week that ruled it was discriminatory for a woman to not be allowed to wear her veil in school or work. We've seen opposite judgements in the past. Christians who won't bake cakes for gays are an obvious one that everyone knows from here and the US. B&B's that won't book gays is another one.

I really don't think the judiciary know which way to go. For a while religious groups seemed to be getting put into a second teir, which personally I enjoyed, but they seem to be making a bit of a comeback, legally speaking.

Removing them as a protected class may work, would need to think of the consequence of that. What does that actually mean for society.

Maybe just means we're moving on.

I'm skeptical about the whole concept of 'hate crime', simply because it seems so arbitrary which groups get recognised. It just seems to depend on the political influence of the group.

A huge number of attacks by men on women I would say have an element of misogyny behind it. And disabled people repeatedly get victimised without (so far) it being recognised as a category. There was also that case of that Goth woman being murdered for reasons that seemed to be to do with her particular fashion sub-culture (though that might partly be a proxy for social-class). Homeless poeple get attacked sometimes for similar reasons.

Most violent crimes probably have an element of group-hate behind them, so maybe just treat them _all_ as hate-crimes and be done with it?

Otherwise once you really include all the possible forms of group-hatred, you'll end up in a situation where you are picking out the small minority of victims where there isn't an obvious group-motivation, and saying 'its less serious to attack these guys, they're fair game'.

(I agree that 'cyclists' is a harder case to make than some others, but its a sliding-scale, 'religion' isn't an unchangeable fact any more than 'intensely disliking driving')

Not sure I agree with all this continual subclassification of existing laws. If you murder somebody does it really matter why? If I glass someone should I receive a harsher sentence because I'm a xenophobic bigot rather than an enlightened europhile?

If you're being threatened cycling then there are already laws which deal with such behaviour.