My thinking on the issue of the constitutionality of sentence enhancement for racially motivated crimes has benefitted enormously from the commentary on my paper, as well as from the commentary directed to other authors. More importantly, this commentary has significantly advanced the inquiry on a topic that is both difficult and important. While agreeing with much of this commentary, there are, nonetheless, many points with which I do not agree. This short reply will be limited, however, to addressing only a few of the more salient points of disagreement. My major quarrel with Professor Martin Redish is his a priori assumption that [a]ll [sentencing enhancement laws] do is punish the of political or social that the government deems offensive or unacceptable.(1) Once Redish has put this First Amendment rabbit into the hat, he can, of course, pull it out to show that any justification for hate crime legislation will not meet the extraordinary applied in free speech cases. A key question, however, is whether statutes enhancing punishment for racial violence in fact do nothing more than punish someone for holding ... offensive political or social attitudes and thus should be subjected to the exceedingly searching reserved for laws that prohibit protected expression or punish beliefs. It was to answer this threshold question, not to justify an already documented infringement of speech, that I examined the various justifications for enhancement.(2) For if the government can invoke some justification other than punishing a person for offensive beliefs, then it is simply not the that all that the sentencing enhancement does is punish people for having unpopular beliefs. Thus, in failing to deal with the various justifications for enhancement, not as interests sufficient to allow infringement of core First Amendment rights, but as evidence that enhancement serves some other purpose than punishing a person for his beliefs, Redish both begs the question and creates a strawman.(3) Susan Gellman's piece in this symposium suffers from the same defect. She repeatedly insists that the ADL model statute cannot survive ... the analysis applicable to content-oriented restrictions on protected speech.(4) Again, however, the question on the table is whether enhanced punishment for racially motivated violence is a content-oriented restriction on expression or belief triggering scrutiny. It was to answer that question that I inquired, analogously to the Supreme Court's inquiry in United States v. O'Brien(5) and Texas v. Johnson,(6) whether the state has an interest for the enhancement unrelated to suppression of expression.(7) O'Brien, which upheld a conviction for draft card burning, applied quite minimal in light of the government's asserted speech neutral interest in efficiently administering the draft--an interest which Professor John Ely has aptly described as plausible but little more.(8) Thus, O'Brien is far from the strict case that Gellman claims it is.(9) As for Johnson, the Court subjected the flag desecration statute to strict scrutiny only after it had determined that the only state interest implicated in that was related to the suppression of expression.(10) Just as Redish and Gellman too facilely assume that core First Amendment values are infringed by penalty enhancement for racially motivated crimes, Professor Frederick Schauer too easily assumes away tough First Amendment problems. Schauer is correct in believing that as a doctrinal matter the Supreme Court might well consider retribution a sufficiently speech neutral justification for enhanced punishment.(11) But deeming an omnipresent justification such as retribution to be sufficient proof that a statute is not aimed at expression or belief is troubling as a matter of sound free speech policy. Schauer does not address this concern, nor the similar policy concerns raised by Professor Larry Alexander in his lucid and insightful commentary. …