From ABC News:
Virginia Lt. Gov. Fairfax compares calls for his resignation to ‘terror lynchings’
The embattled leader spoke unexpectedly on the Virginia Senate floor on Sunday.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax spoke unexpectedly on the state’s Senate floor Sunday, where the embattled leader likened himself to a lynching victim over calls for his resignation in response to the sexual assault accusations made against him.
Moments before the legislative session ended, Republican Sen. Tommy Norment thanked Fairfax for his “professionalism” during the “stressful times,” prompting Fairfax to speak for about six minutes, comparing the accusations against him with “no facts” to terror lynchings that have occurred in the state of Virginia.
This is similar to Clarence Thomas’s contention that he was being subjected to a “high-tech lynching” in 1991, although the accusations against Thomas was much more exiguous, such as making an off-color joke in mixed company.
“If we go backwards and we rush to judgment and we allow for political lynchings without any due process, any facts, or any evidence being heard, then I think we do a disservice to this very body in which we all serve.”
He continued, “We talk about hundreds, at least a hundred terror lynchings that have happened in the Commonwealth of Virginia under those very same auspices…and yet we stand here, in a rush to judgment, with nothing but accusations and no facts. And we decide that we are willing to do the same thing.”
Fairfax also said that if he’d faced the same allegations 50 years ago, “it’d be a very different outcome.”
“I would not be standing up here on the dais,” he said. “A very different outcome would have happened with no facts, no due process, no evidence, no nothing.”
Fifty years ago Fairfax would have been lynched in the Virginia Capitol. After all, who can forget how O.J. Simpson was lynched by USC football fans after his two turnovers cost the Trojans the national title in the 1969 Rose Bowl?
