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A white couple who burned a cross in their yard facing Black neighbors’ home is investigated by FBI

JacksinPA

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A white couple who burned a cross in their yard facing Black neighbors' home are investigated by FBI

The FBI is investigating a white South Carolina couple for racial discrimination after they set a cross on fire in their yard facing toward their Black neighbors’ home.
apnews.com

The FBI is investigating a white South Carolina couple for racial discrimination after they set a cross on fire in their yard last month facing toward their Black neighbors’ home.

Federal civil rights investigators searched the white couple’s home in Conway on Wednesday, according to FBI spokesperson Kevin Wheeler. The retired Black couple also recorded video of the cross being burned on Thanksgiving weekend and described days of repeated threats from their neighbors. The next week, Worden Evander Butler, 28, and Alexis Paige Hartnett, 27, were arrested on state charges of harassment and later released on bond.

Cross burnings in the U.S. are “symbols of hate” that are “inextricably intertwined with the history of the Ku Klux Klan,” according to a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision written by the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The justices ruled that the First Amendment allows bans on cross burnings only when they are intended to intimidate because the action “is a particularly virulent form of intimidation.”

The cross wasn’t on fire by the time local police officers arrived, but was still “facing and in full view of the victims’ home,” according to a Horry County Police Department report. Shawn and Monica Williams, the Black neighbors, told WMBF-TV that the burning cross was about 8 feet (2.4 meters) from their fence. They said they’re reconsidering their decision to move to the neighborhood two years ago in light of this experience.
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'Look away, look away, way down south in Dixie.'
 

Hopefully these racists can be locked up like they deserve.
 


Nothing says "welcome neighbor" like a burning cross.

I think I come here to remind myself how fortunate I am that I don't live there anymore.
 
If it's legal to burn the US flag, why is it illegal to burn a cross? The KKK symbolism is a matter of history, but I'm guessing in this case the racist motive is just a way of trolling neighbors they have a dispute with.

Charging them with harassment will likely cause them to spend on legal fees, and give them a nasty scare. I think that's sufficient to ensure they don't do it again, and the charges could then be dropped. Trolls are generally cowards.
 
The emphasis on which way the cross was facing is irrelevant. What it comes down to is it illegal to burn a cross in your back yard?

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
 
The south shall rise again. Can we hear the story again of how racism doesn't exist in america?
 

Canada, Germany and many other free nations strike a different balance between free speech and harassment. It's not necessarily better or worse: they still broadly support free speech but have lower tolerance for citizens making each other feel unsafe. The US, in defiance of its own history, seems to think that people can shrug off threats, because they can get a gun to defend themselves.

If you take the line that free speech is absolute, then the US is not and never was free. Eugene Debbs was imprisoned for the valid political speech of opposing US involvement in World War 1, and if you think a state of war justifies that, then you still have to reckon with McCarthyism. If the people are not free to advocate legal and political acts, then it simply does not matter that they are free to burn flags or crosses. Political speech is the fundamental and consequential reason to have free speech at all. The right to speak about broad subjects that affect everyone, is far more important than the right to wear religious dress or ornaments, or to cuss out your neighbor.

Literalism has eroded rights in the US. The Constitution is admirable as a framework for law, but as written law it is inadequate. It does not define terms like "speech" or "arms" or even "due process" so the courts can only defend it against lawmakers, by going beyond literalism. Originalism is not much better: on some subjects like due process, there is plenty of thinking documented elsewhere but the Constitution. But on the subject of speech, the authors of the Bill of Rights couldn't imagine a social media platform. Their "intent" is meaningless, on a subject so far beyond their imagination.

Self-regulation works tolerably well, and there is more free speech in the US now, than at any time in history. What we need from the courts, is a continually expanding protection of RIGHTS. Defining what are rights, is a collaborative effort between government and the courts, and ultimately a concession to demands of the People. Literalists hold that only the enumerated rights (speech, assembly, the "press", guns, etc) should be protected from government. They are regressive, they are reactionaries, who want to strip unenumerated rights which have been negotiated between government and the courts. And when it comes to free speech, nothing stops them from declaring social media to be neither individual speech nor the press, and thus not protected by the constitution. A literalist court can't defeat that argument, because platforms share some characteristics of both, but lack all the characteristics of either.

Perhaps it is impossible to ban social media. Shutting down the servers of X, Facebook etc would be the first step, but a distributed system would probably arise in its place, and to ban that government would have to regulate what every computer and device user can run on their own hardware. Posting and hosting could be disguised as legitimate encrypted communication, like banking. That is a lot harder for government to prevent (and even in China they're not succeeding,) but I'd feel safer if the Supreme Court had a manifest intent to protect rights already existing. Literalist courts are a dangerous vulnerability to governments with fascist intent.
 
Ug make hammer said:
Charging them with harassment will likely cause them to spend on legal fees, and give them a nasty scare. I think that's sufficient to ensure they don't do it again, and the charges could then be dropped.
Click to expand...

All it takes is a wealthy supporter to pay their fees and charges and they are free to do it again. They could even crowdfund and there will be people who will donate.
 
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