Bonnie Erbe, writing at the CBS News blog site, has had it up to here with all the hate speech, and its inevitable consequences.  So, she has a cunning plan.

If yesterday’s Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is…

Not only have we had three hate crime murders within the last two weeks (Mr. Johns, as noted above, Dr. George Tiller a week ago last Sunday, and Pvt. William Andrew Long by an American-born Muslim convert outside a recruiting station just before that.)…

It’s not enough to prosecute these murders as murders. They are hate-motivated crimes and each of these men had been under some sort of police surveillance prior to their actions. Isn’t it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?

Let’s call it “preventative detention”, or something equally innocuous.  Let’s pretend that it isn’t a suggestion that is so totalitarian, and so horribly un-American, that Ms. Erbe should be ahsamed for having publicly presented such an evil proposal. You see, not being privy to the internal lives of my fellow citizens, I don’t know which of them will commit a crime, so I don’t feel comfortable imprisoning for the possible consequences of their thoughts.

Ms. Erbe, on the other hand, seems to have no such compunctions.

This is, by the way, where the logic of “hate crimes” inevitably takes you.  Once you realize that prosecution for hate crimes doesn’t stop them, you move to prevent them by other, inevitably totalitarian–means. And, eventually, the definition of what becomes “hate speech” starts expanding.

And so, we’ve arrived now where a “responsible” journalist can now advocate opening up prisons to house those whose only “crime” is to hold insufficiently pure thoughts.