You mention Orwellian Legislation, I'll come back to this...
You say this is what you DON'T want to do... Yet...
By "identifier", do you mean it should be used to Identify certain people who are not following the law or what?
For what purpose? I'd assume its your hope they stop being bigots, sexists, racists and/or homophobes (whomever their hate crime was against).... Is that correct?
If so... Thats sounds a bit Orwellian to me. Its one thing to punish people for their actions but Hate Crime legislation is additional punishment for thought crimes.
That was NOT a failure of the law, it was a failure of enforcement. Society didn't change so much as the Federal Government stepped in and enforced the law. It took soldiers to enforce de-segregation of schools... Once the racist segments of society saw that laws were going to be enforced, many accepted the new "norm" while the few who rebelled became the social outcasts we know them as today.
Once again there are things we agree on, Laws alone are worthless... They need to be enforced! If the local and state governments are corrupt and fail to enforce equality, its the job of the Federal Gov to step in, clean house and enforce the law.
Society would be quicker to accept a new social norm, that of equality, if the laws were enforced equally rather than writing specific laws to protect specific segments of the population, as we are doing now, and enforcing those. That breeds more contempt than the goodwill and acceptance that was hoped for.... Like we see as a result of AA.
I do like the fact that Obama has come out in favor of reforming AA to apply to people of low socio-economic conditions rather than being specifically for minorities... Since Obama was the one to say it, the idea will now become socially acceptable, whereas whites who have made that suggestions for years have been labeled racists.
Congrats! 
We look forward to seeing more of you.
As purely a side note... I'd like to point out that we have disagreed, you are a moderator interacting with a member, and neither of us have felt the need to attack the character or personality of the other... Wonder if anyone will take a lesson in civility from our exchange 
