Curry claim that the importance states give to different types of hate crime policies reflect the history of various post-1960s civil rights movements in the United States. Race, religion, color, and national origin reflect the early legal contest over minorities’ status and rights, “thus, there is a more developed history of invoking and then deploying the law to protect and enhance the status of blacks, Jews, and immigrants.” This is a very moralist perspective, hence mirroring the very sentiments that invoked change in those areas. The women’s movement, gay/lesbian movement, and disability movement reflect a “second wave” of civil right’s activism and “identity politics” and sexual orientation, gender, and disability have only recently been recognized by law, these statuses remain less embedded in hate crime law. They are also more heavily contested protected statuses. Once again, these statuses are most likely to be protected in MPC states followed by IPC then TPC. Eight states have even taken a comprehensive approach in which all crimes can be upgraded to the status of hate crimes. Vermont, another highly moralist state, passed such a law in 1989. Ryken, Jenness, and Curry also attribute the form and timing of adoption of state-level hate crime legislation to interstate institutionalization processes. They write that our even history analysis shows that the pressure to adopt a hate crime law builds as more and more states within the system enact laws. Internal characteristics, however, are also relevant to the spread of hate crime laws, as states with more innovative policy cultures pass laws earlier than do those with less innovative policy cultures. “Shaped by local conditions and broad system effects, the correlates of criminalization resemble those in many other diffusion contexts.” (3) This almost exactly mirrors the application of Elazar to explain po...
