KKK goons kill gay white man
Alabama lynching shows need for united action
By
Leslie Feinberg
The horrific Feb. 19 killing of a gay, white textile mill
worker in Sylacauga, Ala., had all the ritualized trappings of
a Klan-style lynching.
Steven Eric Mullins and Charles Monroe Butler Jr. have
confessed to killing Billy Jack Gaither on the banks of a creek
where many area churches held baptisms. The two men beat
Gaither to death with axe handles. Then they set his body
ablaze on a pyre of kerosene-soaked tires.
Mullins, an avowed white supremacist, reportedly wore his
KKK t-shirts around town and repeatedly provoked African
American residents.
When the details of Gaither's murder were finally released
by the local sheriff's department they were met with outrage
and horror by people from all walks of life. Protests and
vigils are already planned--from Sylacauga to New York.
The national media have highlighted Gaither's brutal death.
Politicians all the way up to the White House felt the need to
speak out in generalities against Gaither's killing.
Why did this crime find its way into national consciousness?
Not simply because it was ghastly. Moments of drunken rage or
jealous frenzy spark many cruel and horrendous murders that do
not attract national attention.
Certainly the media plays a role in determining which cases
become prominent. But grass-roots reports of the murder of
Billy Jack Gaither traveled fast as a heartbeat through the
arteries of the Internet.
The murder of Billy Jack Gaither sent shock waves across
this country and around the world because it was a byproduct of
right-wing ideology, stripped away of all pretense and
hypocrisy.
Billy Jack Gaither's murderers plotted their crime for two
weeks. By the killers' own admissions, the gruesome murder was
carried out for one reason only: Gaither was gay.
It was a lynching. Like the racist lynching of James Byrd
Jr., dragged to his death by white supremacists in Jasper,
Texas, last June. Like the anti-gay lynching of Matthew
Shepard--a college student who was left to die tied to a wooden
fence in Laramie, Wyo., last October.
These murders have begun to awaken a widespread
consciousness that each act of right-wing terror--if left
unanswered and unchecked--emboldens other fascist elements.
As a result, discussions are taking place in offices,
factories, campuses, community centers and homes across the
country about why these lynchings are taking place, and how
this reactionary violence can be halted.
Will hate crime laws stop hate crimes?
President Bill Clinton issued a statement March 5 denouncing
the murder of Gaither. He compared it to the killings of Byrd
and Shepard.
Of course, it has been the Clinton administration that has
provided a bulwark for the attacks on affirmative action.
Clinton found common ground with reactionary Jesse Helms in
attacking same-sex marriages. And early in his administration
he surrendered to the Pentagon brass when they stepped up their
"Don't ask, don't tell" witch hunts.
In his statement, Clinton said he would work for passage of
the Hate Crimes Prevention Act. That legislation strengthens
the power of the Justice Department to prosecute crimes
committed against lesbian and gay victims.
And Alabama State Rep. Alvin Holmes has filed a bill that
would broaden the state hate-crime laws to cover gays and
lesbians.
Alabama, like Wyoming and 39 other states, provides
increased penalties for crimes based on race, religion,
ethnicity, national origin or disability. But 18 of these
states exclude sexual orientation.
This angers many activists who point out that by leaving out
the specific oppression of lesbians, gays, trans and bisexuals,
the cops and courts are signaling bashers that it's open season
on these targeted segments of the population. And because they
are not considered official "hate crimes," anti-gay attacks are
not documented and compiled.
These activists are telling legislators that it's time for
the state to wield its power by cracking down on gay- and
trans-bashers.
It's true that the exclusion of sexual orientation rests on
anti-gay bigotry--plain and simple.
But the question is: Will hate crime laws stop hate
crimes?
It's not clear, for example, how beefed-up sentencing might
have prevented the murders of Byrd, Shepard or Gaither. Their
killers all knew they faced the death penalty if they were
caught and the case was tried as capital murder. There is no
"stiffer" sentence.
At this moment opposition to the death penalty in the
progressive movement is so broad and diverse that it may signal
a turning point in the struggle to abolish it altogether.
Prominent individuals and organizations have denounced the use
of executions by the state as a predominantly racist, anti-poor
weapon.
And, as gay activist Michael Bronski noted in a Feb. 19
article in the Boston Phoenix, "Although there are not many
openly gay men on death row, it is clear that anti-gay
prejudice plays a role in deciding who gets the death
penalty."
He cited examples by Donna Clark, the London-based filmmaker
who created the documentary "Dykes on Death Row." She noted
that women who are perceived to be lesbian are more apt to get
the death sentence. And that likelihood increases for women who
are considered masculine.
"Gay men are at similar risk," Bronski wrote. Among the
examples he offered was the case of Calvin Burdine, an openly
gay man sentenced to death in Texas. The prosecuting attorney
reportedly asked for the death penalty because "Sending a
homosexual to a penitentiary isn't a very bad punishment."
Recently 11 major lesbian and gay organizations,
representing the multinational spectrum of that movement,
issued statements calling for the elimination of the death
penalty altogether. And Billy Jack Gaither's own father said he
opposes the death penalty, even in the case of his son's
killers. (March 5, CNN)
The call for politicians to strengthen the overall punitive
powers of the state through hate crime laws has been met with
opposition. Some activists argue that the organized force of
the state--police, judges, prison authorities and the
military--will not bring its weight to bear for justice for the
lesbian/gay/bi/trans communities or any other oppressed
group.
For example, activists in these communities have fought the
discriminatory Pentagon purges of gays and lesbians. But many
of these gay-rights fighters harbor no illusions that forcing
the brass to abandon this reactionary policy will make the
Pentagon a kinder, gentler killing machine.
The state has always been used as a weapon against
communities that organize for sexual and gender liberation.
Consider the anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s McCarthy era.
FBI infiltration and disruption of the early gay and lesbian
liberation movement. Court-ordered refusals of child-custody
rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans parents. Police
entrapment. Brutality against lesbian/gay/bi/trans
prisoners.
The lesbian/gay/bi/trans communities have always had to
organize to protect themselves from repression by the state.
The 1969 Stonewall Rebellion was a four-day running exercise in
community self-defense against organized, violent police
raids.
After Matthew Shepard's murder, on Oct. 19, some 8,000
people tried to hold a political march in New York City. They
were attacked by bashers in blue uniforms. Using the excuse
that march organizers had no permit, the NYPD beat and arrested
scores of people at the peaceful demonstration.
Since the Giuliani administration illegally refuses to grant
permits for progressive protests, the scheduled March 15
demonstration against Gaither's murder is yet another bold
confrontation by the lesbian/gay/bi/trans community against the
repressive force of the state.
Which way forward?
How the murders of James Byrd Jr., Matthew Shepard and Billy
Jack Gaither are characterized helps to either encourage or
discourage a mass response.
The media and politicians refer to these as acts of hatred.
Certainly hatred is involved. But reducing these crimes to this
extreme human emotion limits an understanding of the role of
reactionary political ideology in shaping and fomenting that
hatred.
The violent bigotry that drives racist and anti-gay lynching
is not an enduring feature of human nature. There's a great
deal of evidence, for example, that prior to the colonial
conquest of the Americas Indigenous peoples lived and worked in
cooperative societies in which same-sex love and gender
variance were held in high esteem.
That's true of ancient cooperative societies on the European
continent as well. The demonization of gay and trans people
arose in tandem with the development of those societies into
class-divided economies. The colonialists brought these forms
of bigotry with their guns and bibles.
The rise of the slave trade and the campaign to wipe out
Indigenous peoples and steal their land and resources required
the refinement of racist ideology by the ruling classes.
The Ku Klux Klan and racist lynching began as barbarous
counterrevolutionary weapons by the former slavocracy, in
partnership with the northern industrialists, to crush the
gains of Black Reconstruction a little more than a century
ago.
Today's media reports that blame the lynching of Byrd,
Shepard and Gaither on the region of the country in which they
lived, or the size of the neighboring populations, obscure the
fact that these murders are a national phenomenon with ties to
right-wing agitation.
What will it take to push back the right wing and to win
even greater social and economic gains?
The answer can be found in the coalescing anger against the
NYPD execution of Amadou Diallo. In the quick reaction of tens
of thousands to march in the streets against the murder of
Matthew Shepard.
And today, the growing momentum of the April 24 national
mobilization to stop the racist execution of political prisoner
Mumia Abu-Jamal is shaping up to be the kind of mass coalition
that can begin to effectively push back both legal and illegal
lynching.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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