SOUTH CAROLINA H3620, THE CLEMENTA C. PINCKNEY HATE CRIMES ACT

"There’s a saying: When the devil ignores you, then you know you’re doing something wrong. The devil goes, ‘Oh, no, leave him alone. He’s my favorite.' Conversely, when the devil comes at you, maybe it’s because you’re trying to do something right." — Denzel Washington

***

After magnanimous grassroots efforts leading to successful passage with a supermajority out of the South Carolina House last year, yet over a year of inaction by the South Carolina Senate since that time regarding South Carolina H3620, also known as the Clementa C. Pinckney Hate Crimes Act, it begs the question: if the colleagues of the fallen ignore the moral mandate behind the gesture of memorializing the man in the passage of this bill, and further ignore the calls from the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce to “think twice” about the opportunity cost of businesses reluctant to expand within any state without hate crimes protection, and most poignantly for the Right, ignore their law enforcement executives who are clamoring for more authorities to uphold their obligation to serve and protect all people within the Palmetto State, then who is “ignoring” this caucus? To whom does this faction cater as a price for being “ignored?”

SC H3620 seeks to shutter the bleak Satanic Mills that employ the members of sites like Stormfront. Wyoming would be the only state left in the Union where right-wing extremist rhetoric could gain outsized purchase and their extremist antics could go largely unchecked. 

“Men of factious tempers” are yet again betraying the interests of the people, in a manner not merely localized to one state, or systemic to the nation, but in a manner befitting that which is globally systemic. Reverend Senator Pinckney argued that America is about “freedom whether we live it out or not:” freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness, and that the Mother Emanuel AME Church, co-founded by Denmark Vesey himself, is “a beacon, and a bearer of the culture, and a bearer of what makes us a people,” things oft attributed to America as the shining “city upon a hill,” whether we live it out or not for the betterment of our world.