Do Evangelical Activists Want to Legalize Gay Lynching?

On December 20th, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act cleared the U.S. Senate in a rare unanimous vote after it was introduced by the chamber’s three African-American members — Sen. Kamala Harris (D-NY), Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) — introduced it earlier in 2018.

It means, bluntly, that if the bill passes, that lynching would be a federal crime. That’s right: Although lawmakers tried to address lynching at the federal level nearly 200 times in the first half of the 20th Century, it was never successful. So here we are in the 21st Century, still trying to fix what Rolling Stone‘s Jamil Smith called “the most sustained campaign of domestic terrorism outside of slavery’s holocaust” after visiting the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama last year.

While the most common symbol of lynching is a hanging, in fact it encompasses a wide variety of heinous acts: being shot repeatedly, burned alive, forced to jump off a bridge, dragged behind cars. Matthew Shepard’s murder in Wyoming in 1998 is the most infamous gay lynching of the past 20 years that spurred a movement to create stricter hate crime legislation and protections for LGBT people.

So it should be a no-brainer to add “lynching” to federal civil rights law. But since in addition to “race, color, religion, and national origin,” this bill would cover crimes motivated by hatred toward a person’s “gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability” — it has some evangelical activists in an uproar.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lynching-bill-lgbt-evangelical-777303/