After more than a century of inaction from Congress, the Senate unanimously approved legislation in December that would make lynching a federal hate crime.
But some conservative evangelical Christian activists are upset that the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act contains language that specifically protects people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. [...]
While emphasizing that he’s generally in favor of banning lynching, Staver claimed the bill is being used to further other proposed federal legislation that would explicitly protect queer Americans from discrimination at work and in other contexts. [...]
Liberty Counsel has spent years advocating against LGBTQ rights, prioritizing the religious liberty of conservative Christians over the civil rights of queer Americans. The organization represented Kim Davis, the now-former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Staver, who served as her lawyer, painted her as an evangelical Christian heroine, comparing her at one point to Jewish people who were persecuted by the Nazis.
On its surface, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act isn’t about queer rights. The bill addresses the crime of lynching ― extrajudicial executions carried out by a mob. According to the NAACP, lynching was used after the Civil War to resolve “some of the anger that whites had in relation to the free blacks.” At least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans, were reportedly lynched in America from 1882 to 1968. [...]
“With the grossly disproportionate rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ people, and the horrifying rate of murders of transgender women of color in particular, a demand to strip [sexual orientation and gender identity] out of an anti-lynching bill is truly dumbfounding, and beyond comprehension,” she said. “That it would be done by someone claiming to be motivated by Christian teachings just shows how deeply perverse and inhumane that anti-LGBT advocacy can become.”
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