Slippery slope: treating bias as mental illness

This could lead to way too many problems with bias being an excuse for people to plead insanity when facing criminal charges. Basically, it would make hate crimes non-existent.
It is true, biases are unreasonable, and a person may have some reason for his or her biases, but this does not excuse them. In the case of the homophobic man mentioned, his mental illness was exactly that: a phobia--not bias.
Furthermore, we must remember that in relation to crime, the legal definition of insanity is lack of knowledge of right versus wrong (particularly of societal conceptions of right versus wrong), or lack of control over one's own actions.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10389484