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September 27, 2007
A bit more Jena 6 scrutiny
Posted by: Chris
Jamie Kirchick chimes in on the Jena 6, hitting many of the same notes I did, in a column for Advocate.com:
It says much about the state of the American civil rights establishment when its foremost organizations recast a group of brutal thugs -- the “Jena 6” -- as heroic victims persecuted by a racist judicial system. And it says even worse things about the country’s preeminent gay rights group when it somehow contorts that dubious cause into its own.
But that’s what happened with the Human Rights Campaign’s endorsement of the movement to free the Jena 6, a group of black teenagers who beat and stomped a 17-year-old white boy into unconsciousness last December.
Likewise over at Gay Patriot, Gay Patriot West (that would be Dan), takes things a step further, making an interesting point about HRC's use of the Jena 6 beating to draw hate crime analogies:
The alleged injustice here was not the absence of such legislation, but the presence of prosecutorial misconduct. But, I guess that’s irrelevant to Joe when he has a chance to join his fellow leftists in attacking Bush. (If anything, a hate crimes law might justify the prosecutor’s alleged excesses if he believed that the Jena 6 assaulted the white teen because of his race.)
I'm in favor of hate crime laws, though I've made the point previously that the prevailing apologist explanation for the Jena 6 beating actually elevates it from a senseless beating to a race-motivated hate crime. It's nice to see others reaching some of the same conclusions and asking more questions that HRC will probably never deign to answer. Stay tuned…
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