Congress gave final approval Monday to legislation that for the first time would make lynching a federal hate crime in the U.S., sending the bill to President Joe Biden to sign into law.
Years in the making, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is among some 200 bills that have been introduced over the past century that have tried to ban lynching in America.
It is named for the Black teenager whose brutal killing in Mississippi in 1955 — and his mother's insistence on a open funeral casket to show the world what had been done to her child — became a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights era.
"After more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching, Congress is finally succeeding in taking a long overdue action by passing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
The bill would make it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury, according to the bill's champion, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. The maximum sentence under the Anti-Lynching Act is 30 years.
"Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy," said Rush.
This is what politicians use your tax dollars for. They repeatedly (200 failed attempts) try to pass a law that is already a law.
Maybe the reason it failed 200 other times is because a few politicians were smart enough to see that lynching was already against the law. Furthermore, any kind of racial-based lynching would already be a "hate crime," that into today's climate would obviously send the perpetrator(s) to federal death row.
If you're a reader of the blog, then you've probably already read my piece on "hate crimes" in which I addressed the stupidity of "hate crimes" on the premise that nobody commits violent crimes out of love. Plus, adding an emotional adjective to a crime is just silly on merit. How is violence motivated by robbery any different than violence motivate by dislike? Violent criminal acts should be punished equally in the eyes of the law. Anything else is a miscarriage of justice.
Isn't it odd how the bill didn't pass 200 other times, and now it suddenly passes unanimously? Any guesses why that might be? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that nobody wanted to be called the "r word" for voting against it. But, that's just a wild guess.
At this point our system is pretty much just a joke. I mean, it's not a joke if you're white and they come after you (which is exactly what laws like this are designed to do). If that happens, it's no laughing matter.
Who can recall off the top of their head the last lynching that occurred in America? I couldn't recall, so I looked it up, and it was in Mobile, AL in 1981. That's 40 years ago. How is this even relevant today?
I think when people talk about downsizing government, this is what they have in mind. There is just no reason that taxpayer money be used on this kinda stuff. It seems a lot like "busy work," like when there isn't enough to do and the boss doesn't want you standing around.
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