Margo Smith said she would have expected to be the target of hate crime in her native Iowa -- one reason she never came out as a lesbian until recently. But it was a little more than a month ago in Las Vegas, where she has lived for the past year, that she was attacked.

She said she was dropping a female friend off after a long night of playing music with a group of their friends. They sat in her friend's driveway and talked until her friend's stepfather, whom Smith had never met, emerged from the house and started yelling at them and shouting slurs about Smith's sexual orientation.