The six black
Louisiana youths known as the Jena 6 have become a cause
célèbre for many civil rights activists, including
the LGBT movement, who say the teens have been
wronged. But are they really worthy of our
support?
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.
Last week HRC president Joe Solmonese traveled all the
way to Jena, La., along with thousands of other
supporters and declared that “this injustice
cannot stand.” By “injustice,” he was
presumably referring to the prosecution and sentencing
of the young men responsible for the beating, which
critics have called unfair. On Advocate.com, HRC’s
associate director of diversity, Donna
Payne, wrote that the group will be
“standing shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with our
coalition partners in the civil rights community,
calling for the equal treatment for these young
victims of discrimination.” Yet it’s unclear
just what injustice has been committed against the
Jena 6 -- and, more important, why HRC, or any gay
people for that matter, should be defending them.
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Kirchick is on the editorial staff of The New
Republic and a columnist forthe Washington Blade. Read the story by Donna
Payne that inspired this response.