You’ve got to hand it to the Democrats: they’re all about dealing with the important stuff. You or I might think that passing a law to make illegal something that hasn’t happened in over half a century, and is already a crime anyway, is redundant, time-wasting and virtue-signalling. I mean, it’s not as if the US government has other stuff to worry about, y’know, footling stuff like war, inflation, illegal immigration.
Hell, no: the Dems are all about the important stuff.
After more than a century and 200 failed attempts, the US congress has passed legislation that will make lynching a federal hate crime, sending the bill to President Joe Biden to sign into law.
After all, the last lynching in the US was only a mere 41 years ago. And because there was no law against it, apparently, the perpetrators got off scot-free.
Oh, wait… they were all jailed, and one of them executed.
This is clearly urgent stuff.
After sailing through the House of Representatives last month, the Senate unanimously passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Monday night.
It is named after the 14-year-old black boy who was murdered after being accused of insulting a white woman in Mississippi in 1955, one of the most notorious race crimes in America’s modern history. The law will designate lynching as a hate crime, punishable by 30 years in jail.
“Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy,” said Bobby Rush, a Democrat representative for Illinois who pushed the bill.
Actually, as we see, it hasn’t been used for decades. As for being “uniquely American”, while the term “lynching” was indeed coined in America, the crime of vigilante justice (so-called) and mob-murder is a world-wide phenomenon. One that still exists — but in plenty of places that aren’t America.
(It might also be noted that nearly a third of known lynching victims in the US between 1882 and Till’s murder in 1955, were white.)
The law is largely symbolic, as a fatal lynching would still carry a murder charge, punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty. The new legislation will allow prosecution for conspiracy to commit a hate crime in such cases, however, and acknowledges that lynching carries a deeper social and political context.
The Times
“Largely symbolic”? “Wholly symbolic” would be a better description, given that the crime is already, well, a crime, and hasn’t been committed in nearly half a century.
But that’s the Democrats for you: dealing with the really urgent stuff.
