I literally just found out about this and read up maybe 10 minutes ago, so bear with me - I probably don't have all the facts.

First I'm going to dismantle a bit of your post that was absolutely not true:

There is no such thing as a kindness crime or a love crime.

To this day there exist places where euthanasia is illegal, and it is considered a kindness to put people out of their misery that exist in such a state that they are not allowed to die in spite of their wishes. To put a personal touch on the story, I knew a girl that spent over a year seeking out people to kill her over social media before she finally found a guy willing to do so - he went to prison for doing what she asked when he slit her throat. Some people simply don't want to live. Their entire life is a state of absolute suffering. Someone like you or me would look at them and say "it's not so bad," but in their own minds they live in a state of absolute and perpetual suffering. When they are committed enough they will eventually find someone to put them to rest, and they'll convince that someone that what they are doing is a kindness.

Maybe I don't understand what you mean by "love crime," but there are also most definitely crimes that occur as a result of "love." I know a guy that spent years in prison and is still, to this day, on probation because he buried a hatchet in someone else's back for screwing his wife. This guy is 300+ pounds of pure kindness, if you met him you would never have any idea that he's done what he's done - but the love he had for the woman of his dreams motivated him to do something terrible under the completely wrong circumstances.

The law is not designed to accommodate your feelings in any given situation. The law is designed to enforce an acceptable standard of human behavior. You are not allowed to kill people. They may ask, beg, and plead for you to kill them - but you are not allowed to do so. You may walk in on someone screwing the brains out of a woman that pledged her loyalty to you and, while you might get some leniency, you are not allowed to put them down.

Now, hate crimes. Hate crimes came into existence for the sake of reinforcing the belief that no one should hate someone else because of their race or religion. They were manufactured in the United States, likely (and this is my personal speculation) for the sake of reinforcing the melting pot culture we value. Everything I've read that I can recall points to the 80's for the origin of the term, meaning the first "hate crimes" were labeled as such roughly a decade after the civil rights movement. "Hate crimes" are a label overwhelmingly applied to anti-black violence and recently (in my personal experience) expanded to general anti-minority violence. I may sound like a bigot, but they were, as you seem to they are, an absolutely unnecessary (in my opinion) label that served only to amplify the severity of a crime. The end-goal is socially justified, though - to do something evil is bad, but to do something evil against another individual due to their race or religious beliefs is not only bad but is also anti-American. This country prides itself on being the Land of the Free: a place where you can be any race or religion and in spite of that do just as well as the next guy. It's fitting that in a country that maintains such a goal that a crime committed in direct conflict of that warrant more severe punishment.

That being said, I will say that I feel the application of the term "hate crime" is extremely significant in this particular circumstance. This is an issue that has caught nationwide attention, and the victim of the hate crime is white. Labeling it as such sends a very clear message that not being white no longer grants immunity from accusations of racism. This is a huge deal in a time where racial tension is at its highest that most of our younger generations have ever experienced.