Evangelicals Lobby Against Anti-Lynching Law

Evangelical Christianity has become something truly foul and ugly.  The latest example? Liberty Counsel, a hate group masquerading as a "Christian" charity, is leading the charge in opposition to the “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act” that was introduced by the U. S. Senate's three black Senators.  Why the opposition?  Because the language of the proposed act includes LGBT victims (I would also suggest that given the racism of a majority of evangelicals, in my opinion, they support lynching in general).  A piece in LGBT Nation looks at this hate motivated effort by evangelicals.  Here are excerpts:

Proving once again that white evangelicals are no longer a religious group, but a political entity, one of the religious right’s most active organizations has announced they are lobbying against a proposed federal anti-lynching law.

Why? Because it includes LGBTQ people.

“The old saying is once that camel gets the nose in the tent, you can’t stop them from coming the rest of the way in,” Matt Staver, founder of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Liberty Counsel, told the far right outlet OneNewsNow. “And this would be the first time that you would have in federal law mentioning gender identity and sexual orientation as part of this anti-lynching bill.”

Federal law already includes gender identity and sexual orientation in hate crimes protections.

Staver observes, “but this is a way to slip it in under a so-called anti-lynching bill, and to then to sort of circle the wagon and then go for the juggler at some time in the future.”

The proposed legislation passed the Senate in a rare unanimous vote last month. The “Justice for Victims of Lynching Act” was introduced by the chamber’s three black Senators: California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris, South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott, and New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker.

The bill describes lynching as “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States.”

Staver says his organization is currently lobbying Congress members against the bill before it can pass the House of Representatives.

Liberty Counsel masquerades as a legal charity, but has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It has deep ties to other extremist religious right organizations.

Racist Jeff Sessions to Target Marijuana Users

As previous posts have indicated, in my opinion Attorney General Jeff Sessions is an avowed racist despite his protests to the contrary.  Having known the man since the days we were both in Mobile, Alabama (I lived there when Sessions refused to prosecute KKK members who lynched a young black man), Sessions will do anything he can to keep blacks - and gays for that matter - second class citizens.  Moreover, he supports any policy that will help to disproportionately disenfranchise black Americans.  Hence the news that Sessions plans to enforce antiquated federal marijuana laws even in states that have legalized and regulate the sale and possession of small amounts for personal use.  The move comes just as Der Trumpenführer has disbanded his committee to investigate non-existent voter fraud which many believed was a thinly veiled effort to disenfranchise minorities and the poor.  Apparently what could not be accomplished by Trump's farcical committee will now be accomplished through marijuana prosecutions. Politico looks at Sessions' disingenuous move.  Here are excerpts:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding the Obama-era policy that had paved the way for legalized marijuana to flourish in states across the country, two people with knowledge of the decision told The Associated Press. Sessions will instead let federal prosecutors where pot is legal decide how aggressively to enforce federal marijuana law, the people said.

The move by President Donald Trump's attorney general likely will add to confusion about whether it's OK to grow, buy or use marijuana in states where pot is legal, since long-standing federal law prohibits it. It comes days after pot shops opened in California, launching what is expected to become the world's largest market for legal recreational marijuana and as polls show a solid majority of Americans believe the drug should be legal.

Sessions, who has assailed marijuana as comparable to heroin and has blamed it for spikes in violence, had been expected to ramp up enforcement. Pot advocates argue that legalizing the drug eliminates the need for a black market and would likely reduce violence, since criminals would no longer control the marijuana trade.

The Obama administration in 2013 announced it would not stand in the way of states that legalize marijuana, so long as officials acted to keep it from migrating to places where it remained outlawed and out of the hands of criminal gangs and children.

The pot business has since become a sophisticated, multimillion-dollar industry that helps fund schools, educational programs and law enforcement. Eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and California's sales alone are projected to bring in $1 billion annually in tax revenue within several years.

Sessions' policy will let U.S. attorneys across the country decide what kinds of federal resources to devote to marijuana enforcement based on what they see as priorities in their districts, the people familiar with the decision said.

The change also reflects yet another way in which Sessions, who served as a federal prosecutor at the height of the drug war in Mobile, Alabama, has reversed Obama-era criminal justice policies that aimed to ease overcrowding in federal prisons and contributed to a rethinking of how drug criminals were prosecuted and sentenced. While his Democratic predecessor Eric Holder told federal prosecutors to avoid seeking long mandatory minimum sentences when charging certain lower level drug offenders, for example, Sessions issued an order demanding the opposite, telling them to pursue the most serious charges possible against most suspects.

Sit in criminal court any morning and you will witness white defendants with money getting off or light sentences for marijuana possession while poor blacks without resources to hire a private attorney get slammed and receive sentences that put them in prison and deprive them of the right to vote.  Sessions knows what he is doing and it is disgusting.  He might as well wear KKK robes while on the job.  

Mitch McConnell's Effort to Muzzle Coretta Scott King.

Click image to enlarge

As I have noted before on this blog, I lived in the Mobile, Alabama area from 1977 to 1981.  Back in that time period, Jeff Sessions was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and was considered reactionary even by many wealthy conservatives. Things did not get better with time with Sessions. While I was still living in Mobile, a 19 year old black man named Michael Donald was murdered in what was the last recorded lynching in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, and hanged his body from a tree.  Session's office did not prosecute the case, but both men were arrested and convicted.  Subsequently, due to the efforts of Thomas Figures, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Mobile, FBI agent James Bodman, and Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights activist, the killers were ultimately arrested over two and a half years after the murder and were prosecuted, with one receiving the death penalty.After dropping the ball on the Donald case, Sessions prosecuted three black community organizers in the Black belt of Alabama, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s former aide Albert Turner, for voter fraud, alleging tampering with 14 absentee ballots. The prosecution stirred charges of selective prosecution of black voter registration. The defendants, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted of all charges by a jury.

Fast forward to this week and hearings on the nomination of Sessions to the office of Attorney General of the United States are taking place (sadly, Senate Republicans confirmed him). During the hearings Senator Elizabeth Warren sought to read into the Senate record a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King (see the image above) who, based on the facts recited above, held Sessions in low regard.  Mitch McConnell, among the most despicable and hypocrisy filled members of the Senate invoked an arcane Senate rule to silence Warren.  A piece in Slate makes the case that McConnell - who clearly hates Warren - was most motivated by his desire to muzzle the words of Coretta Scott King.  Here are article highlights:

By design, the U.S. Senate is a deliberative body in which members have every opportunity to speak their minds on the subject at hand. There are exceptions tied to decorum: Attack or impugn a colleague and the chamber reserves the right to strip speaking privileges from the offending member. On Tuesday night, it did just that to Elizabeth Warren. . . . This extraordinary step was initiated by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader. What did Elizabeth Warren say? How did she “impugn the motives and conduct” of the senator from Alabama? She read a letter. Specifically, Warren read from a 1986 letter by Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on the subject of then–federal prosecutor Jeff Sessions, submitted in opposition to his nomination for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. It was because of the letter that McConnell sought to silence Warren. And it’s in revisiting that letter that we can see how McConnell was right to be shook. Not because King was mistaken, but because her 30-year-old indictment of Jeff Sessions is now an indictment of the entire Republican Party. In Sessions, King saw a throwback to the Jim Crow officials who fought to disenfranchise black Americans throughout the South. “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge," wrote King in her 10-page statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which ultimately rejected Sessions in a 10–8 vote with two Republicans joining eight Democrats in voting against Ronald Reagan’s nominee. “Mr. Sessions’ conduct as U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights law, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.” King went on to describe Sessions’ role in pursuing and prosecuting a trio of black voting rights activists in Perry County, Alabama:

“Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists ... who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among Blacks, had learned to use the process within the bounds of legality and had taught others to do the same. The only sin they committed was being too successful in gaining votes.”

King detailed clear abuses of authority, from selective prosecution—ignoring allegations of similar behavior by whites—to pressuring and intimidating witnesses. “Many elderly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again,” King wrote.

For McConnell and his Republican colleagues, King’s critique of Sessions’ work was a personal attack. He saw this well-grounded accusation of racism as worse than the actions it described. And so he called for silence.

Despite the pivotal role the letter played in Sessions’ confirmation hearing in 1986, the then-chair of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, never entered it into the congressional record. Now that we have the letter, however, we can see how relevant it is not just to Sessions’ bid for the attorney general’s office but as a judgment on the Republican Party as a whole.

  

Judge Vacates Conviction in 1944 Execution of 14 Year Old Black Youth

If one wonders why blacks in America do not trust the American criminal justice system - and why police induced "confessions" should always be suspect - look no farther than the case of 14-year-old George J. Stinney Jr., who was executed in South Carolina.  Stinney is the youngest American ever executed and when one looks at the "trial" he received, it quickly takes on the appearance of a legalized lynching.  No doubt, "godly" white folks pushed for his conviction and applauded his execution.  After all, since he was black, in their minds, it's not as if he were human, right?  Sadly, that mindset is alive and well in the South and seemingly many police departments in America.  The New York Times looks at the vacating of Stinney's kangaroo court conviction.  Here are excerpts:

Calling it a “great and fundamental injustice,” a South Carolina judge on Wednesday vacated the 1944 murder conviction of 14-year-old George J. Stinney Jr., the youngest person executed in the United States in the last century.

Judge Carmen T. Mullen of Circuit Court did not rule that the conviction of Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls in the town of Alcolu was wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways to safeguard the constitutional rights of Mr. Stinney, who was black, from the time he was taken into custody until his death by electrocution.

The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenager’s peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and his court-appointed attorney did “little to nothing” to defend him. His confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, she added, “due to the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.”

The order was a rare application of coram nobis, a legal remedy that can be used only when a conviction was based on an error of fact or unfairly obtained in a fundamental way and when all other remedies have been exhausted.

Two white men who had helped search for the girls also testified, and a cellmate of Mr. Stinney’s recounted conversations in which Mr. Stinney said he was innocent and had been made to confess. Less than three months passed between the murder and the execution; the trial and sentencing took less than a day.

Some of the problems of due process highlighted in the ruling were not rare in the Jim Crow South.

Yet another less than proud legacy of the South.

Quote of the Day - The Tragedy Of Trayvon

Yes, the picture is graphic, but this is what murder looks like

Among all of our friends that we socialized with today, not a one was pleased with the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial.  Many hoped that Zimmerman would be hit with a successful civil lawsuit and some expected that no one outside of Teabagistan would ever hire him and expose their business to adverse consequences.  But to me, the message is clear: the South has changed far less than many would like to believe, especially on issues of race.  Bigotry is rampant - here in Virginia, white Republicans are pushing for voter ID laws to disenfranchise blacks and other non-whites, and favor "stand your ground" laws.  Andrew Sullivan summed things up well:

I found the way in which many elements on the right brandished their relish at seeing Zimmerman vindicated was more repellent than the identity politics faction that politicized the case. A young black man was dead, after he was clearly racially profiled, followed and challenged. Those facts alone should, in my view, lead to nothing but sadness, not a gleeful turn on the racial merry-go-round.

I didn’t follow the trial that closely largely because of that. There’s no way any of us can know precisely what happened in that violent interaction, except that Zimmerman clearly made a decision that led directly to it. But when an all-white jury in America finds a “white” man innocent of killing an unarmed black man, the resonances are simply undeniable.

The “stand-your-ground” law – when it interacts with race – can come perilously close to a return to the right to lynch black men in America- for being be in the wrong place at the wrong time, for doing nothing wrong, except wearing a hoodie and carrying some Skittles. Perhaps the best way to react now is to raise awareness about these laws that all but sanction murder because in a one-on-one conflict, in which there are no reliable witnesses and in which one of the individuals is dead, reasonable doubt is a very hard hurdle to overcome. This verdict may give some racist vigilantes encouragement to single out and murder black men with a sense of impunity. That is simply unacceptable, to put it mildly. It is a terrifying reminder of how the past can become present again.

Today is not a day that I am proud to be an American or a Southerner.  Some say we need to respect the verdict of the jury.  I'm not one of them.  Having practiced law for over 35 years, miscarriages of justice are the norm in our legal system - especially if one is a minority of any form.

Washington Post Slams Virginia GOP

Not to beat a dead horse, but the Washington Post has a great editorial that rips the Virginia GOP a new one over the naked bigotry demonstrated against judicial nominee Tracy Thorne-Begland who suffered the equivalent of a lynching in the Virginia House of Delegates.  The sad episode clear shows the true face of the Republican Party of Virginia and its Christofascist puppeteers at The Family Foundation, a foul "family vales" organization based in Richmond.  Here are highlights from the editorial:

IF ANYTHING, Tracy Thorne-Begland, a top state prosecutor in Richmond with a decade of courtroom experience, is overqualified for a judgeship on the General District Court. Mr. Thorne-Begland, who has prosecuted dozens of homicides and other major felonies, runs one of the biggest commonwealth’s attorney’s offices in Virginia. The caseload of the court to which he was nominated consists mainly of traffic violations, minor crimes and run-of-the-mill civil disputes over contracts and late rent payments.

But the judicial nomination of Mr. Thorne-Begland, a former Navy fighter pilot who is gay, was sabotaged by an ugly campaign of homophobic bigotry led by Virginia Republicans. In a vote at 1 a.m. Tuesday, the GOP-dominated House of Delegates, with an avowed homophobe leading the charge, killed his candidacy, thereby ensuring that Virginia state courts remain free of openly gay judges.

As Richmond’s chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney, he isn’t regarded as a gay rights advocate; he is seen as a consummately professional prosecutor.  But for House Republicans, and for the Family Foundation, an anti-gay group that stirred up opposition to Mr. Thorne-Begland’s nomination, his sexual orientation trumped his copious professional qualifications. Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), who last year expressed the view that gays are “intrinsically disordered,” denounced the nominee as “an aggressive activist for the pro-homosexual agenda.”

Mr. Marshall — known in Richmond as “Sideshow Bob” — said that, as a gay man living with a domestic partner, Mr. Thorne-Begland had a lifestyle that would impede him from upholding Virginia’s constitution, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. As if the nominee’s sexual orientation would cripple his ability to preside over traffic cases and misdemeanors.

No matter how they dressed it up, the Republicans’ opposition boiled down to old-fashioned prejudice. Even by voting at 1 a.m., they couldn’t hide the fact that bigotry and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is alive and well in the state of Virginia.

This sad episode conclusively proves the LGBT Virginians cannot expect fair treatment in Virginia, be it in the courts, state employment and just about all other fronts. The Republican Party and its hate group backers continue to do all they can to make us less than full citizens.

Evidence Shows Census Worker Murdered

We still do not know many details on who killed part time U.S. census worker, Bill Sparkman, who was found hanged in a rural Kentucky cemetery. One thing seems clear, however - this was MURDER and not a case of suicide as some had tried to put out initially. Moreover, the fact that Sparkman was a federal worker does seem to have played a part in his murder. The next question becomes whether or not Sparkman was a victim of the anti-government hysteria being fanned by Glenn Beck and other demagogues who are stirring up the birther and teabagger nutcases. If he was a victim of this type of hate, who will be next? Gays? Jews? Those perceived to be Hispanic immigrants? Something truly needs to be done to shut down the growing hatred being spewed by the far right. Here are highlights from the New York Times that certainly suggest that this was no ordinary murder:

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BIG CREEK, Ky. (AP) -- A part-time census worker found hanging in a rural Kentucky cemetery was naked, gagged and had his hands and feet bound with duct tape, said an Ohio man who discovered the body two weeks ago. The word ''fed'' was written in felt-tip pen on 51-year-old Bill Sparkman's chest, but authorities have released very few other details in the case, such as whether they think it was an accident, suicide or homicide.

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Jerry Weaver of Fairfield, Ohio, told The Associated Press on Friday that he was certain from the gruesome scene that someone killed Sparkman. ''He was murdered,'' Weaver said. ''There's no doubt.'' Weaver said he was in the rural Kentucky county for a family reunion and was visiting some family graves at the cemetery on Sept. 12 along with his wife and daughter when they saw the body. ''The only thing he had on was a pair of socks,'' Weaver said. ''And they had duct-taped his hands, his wrists. He had duct tape over his eyes, and they gagged him with a red rag or something.''

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''And they even had duct tape around his neck,'' Weaver said. ''And they had like his identification tag on his neck. They had it duct-taped to the side of his neck, on the right side, almost on his right shoulder.'' Authorities have refused to say if Sparkman was at work going to door-to-door for census surveys before he died. Both of the people briefed on the investigation confirmed Sparkman's Census Bureau ID was found taped to his head and shoulder area.

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The Census Bureau has suspended door-to-door interviews in the rural county pending the investigation. State Trooper Don Trosper said it was clear this wasn't a natural death but said all other possibilities were being considered.

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This is a truly horrible thing. Those responsible need to be caught and it will be interesting what motivated them. Obviously, Sparkman's job as a census workers does seem to have involvement.