TO PROVE IT IS the party of Lincoln and not Lott, the Republicans have made a startling declaration:

They hate lynchings!

This is incredible. As recently as 1999, President Bush, then governor of Texas, refused to support a new hate crimes law that would have stiffened penalties and added new provisions for gay and lesbian victims. Only seven months ago, Republicans blocked an attempt to add sexual orientation and disabilities to federal hate crimes laws.

What a difference seven months makes. What a difference the victim makes. He is not black like James Byrd, dragged behind a pickup truck in Texas in 1998. He is not gay like Matthew Shepard, skull crushed and tied to a fence in Wyoming in 1998.

This lynch victim is white, well off, and has a son in Congress. He is the oppressed Charles Pickering.

Pickering is the Mississippi judge who was renominated by Bush to the US Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Pickering's first attempt at confirmation was defeated 10 months ago by the then Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. Pickering's problem was that despite his self-proclaimed, anti-KKK reformation from segregationist beginnings, in 1995 he won a dramatically lenient sentence for a white man convicted for burning an 8-foot cross on the lawn of an interracial family.

The family had been repeatedly harassed by local racists to the point of a bullet reportedly nearly hitting their child. Pickering got the sentence reduced from a mandated seven years to 27 months.

When Pickering's nomination was defeated, Senator Orrin Hatch, the reigning Republican on the Judiciary Committee, screamed that ''extreme left Washington special interest groups'' would do anything ''in order to do their lynching.'' Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, called it a ''judicial lynching.'' Combine that with Clarence Thomas hollering that he was a victim of a high-tech lynching on his way to the Supreme Court and a Martian might think that Republicans are in chains getting whipped by Al Sharpton.

Other Republicans were so angry you would have thought they were talking about a real lynching victim. Bush said it was ''unfortunate for democracy and unfortunate for America.'' Bush also said he was ''deeply disappointed'' that Pickering was ''denied the opportunity to further serve his country.'' Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa said it was a ''dark day'' when Pickering was ''viciously attacked.'' Senator Don Nickles was aghast that evil forces were ''trying to kill'' the nomination.

An outraged Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the state once synonymous with lynching, reacted by saying, ''This is a message, you know ... we will take care of him or her.'' Lott, beside himself, said, ''I'm not going to let go of it for a long time.''

Pickering himself decried this ''bitter and mean-spirited'' moment in American history. He gasped a fervent hope that no one else ''has to go through what has happened to me.''

The renomination of Pickering is telling for lots of reasons. It has been less than a month since Lott was forced off his Senate majority leadership post for his romantic comments about segregation. The new majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, promised to heal the wounds of the Lott affair. He claimed that the Republican Party is ''more in synch with the African-American population today.''

By renominating Pickering, the Republicans have proven that out of a nation of 150 million white adults, they still find it hard to find white guys who synchronize their watches to the year 2003. The Republican senators who cry that Pickering's leniency is being unfairly used against him were the same senators who let John Ashcroft hang Ronnie White's nomination for a federal judgeship from the Senate's rafters in 1999. Ashcroft, now our attorney general despite his honorary degree from racist and homophobic Bob Jones University and his hero worship of Confederate leaders, grossly distorted and misstated the record of White, an African-American, as ''pro-criminal'' when White had actually upheld the death penalty on the Missouri Supreme Court about as much or even more than his colleagues.

Even though Ashcroft all but lied, Hatch found White ''very troubling'' and voted against him. Frist also voted against White. But for Pickering, who defanged existing hate laws for a cross-burner, Frist says he is ''eminently qualified.''

Frist is even starting to blame the Democrats for using race against Pickering. The use of race by the Republicans cannot be more ironic. It shows how brazen the Republicans are when they invoke such horrible images of Pickering's treatment when Pickering himself was soft on the very act that throughout our nation's history foreshadowed the lynching of hundreds, if not thousands, of African-Americans.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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