The clearly bigoted and anti-transgender Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently praised the 49-year prison sentence a Mississippi man just received for murdering a transgender woman back in 2015.
Wait – what?
You read that right. The former Alabama senator and nominee of the supposedly anti-LGBT extremist Trump administration hailed the sentence as a fitting end to a clear hate crime against someone’s gender identity.
“Today’s sentencing reflects the importance of holding individuals accountable when they commit violent acts against transgender individuals,” Sessions said of the sentencing in a press release Monday. “The Justice Department will continue its efforts to vindicate the rights of those individuals who are affected by bias motivated crimes.”
Sessions' condemnation of the anti-trans hate crime comes after Joshua Brandon Vallum, 29, of Lucedale, Mississippi, was sentenced to nearly half a century behind bars for murdering a transgender woman wth whom he’d formerly had a sexual relationship about two years ago. According to Justice Department officials, Vallum, who's a member of the Latin Kings street gang, knew full well Mercedes Williamson was transgender when they first started seeing one another.
But after learning a friend had found out about Williamson’s gender history, Vallum reportedly became concerned his fellow gang members wouldn’t take kindly to his sleeping with a woman who used to…well, not be a woman. So, to remedy the situation, he decided to kill her – by luring her to Mississippi, shooting her with a stun gun, stabbing her repeatedly and beating her chest with a hammer, to be exact.
Vallum pled guilty to murder in the Southern District of Mississippi back in December.
FBI Special Agent in Charge Christopher Freeze affirmed Sessions’ sentiments that these kinds of hate crimes won’t be tolerated by the Trump administration.
“Crimes motivated by hate have devastating effects on the victims, their families and community, but also leave a blemish on our society as a whole,” said Freeze. “The FBI's mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States, and we will continue to pursue that mission in Mississippi. The outcome of this case would not have been possible without the partnership between local, state and federal law enforcement.”
During his confirmation, Sessions was heavily accused of being an ant-LGBT extremist who would usher in a new age of violence and fear throughout the gay and trans communities. The Human Rights Campaign even accused Sessions of “ignor[ing] every opportunity to protect the LGBTQ community from violence, discrimination, and marginalization,” echoing similar accusations made against President Donald Trump, also a supposed anti-gay bigot, well before his election in November.
But while Sessions and the larger Trump administration may not willingly roll over in favor of every left-wing LGBT agenda item, it seems pretty clear they’re not ones to take hate crimes – including those in the LGBT community – very lightly.
Even in the supposedly backwoods, racist, gay-hating Deep South.