Crossposted at Equality Loudoun

What you will see below is the result of people being told they should see other people as “it.”

A woman is violently assaulted in a Baltimore McDonalds, dragged across the floor, repeatedly kicked in the head until she has a seizure, and is left to convulse in a corner while employees watch and record the assault on their phones. They can be heard laughing and encouraging the assailants in the background. One posted his video on the internet later, to entertain his friends. You can hear one of them near the end, warning the assailants “police on their way. Y’all better get out of here.” The only person who attempts to help the woman is an elderly female customer.

Warning: The video is extremely violent and disturbing. I’m reposting it because it’s important that people understand the consequences of their careless, self-centered actions.

The victim is currently hospitalized in fair condition, and we pray for her full recovery. The two assailants have been apprehended. The status of the McDonalds employees who facilitated the hate crime is unknown at this time. Below are screenshots from the Facebook and Twitter pages of one of the alleged employees, Vernon Hackett, who has apparently been forced to delete his accounts. Good. Behavior has consequences. These employees knowingly facilitated a hate crime. Shame them. Shun them. Push them to the margins of society where they belong.

Let McDonalds know how important it is that they follow through with the promising statement they made, in which they claim that “nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and employees in our restaurants.” The message to franchises must be unequivocal: These employees knowingly facilitated a hate crime. There will be zero tolerance for such behavior by any McDonald’s employee, and McDonalds will fully cooperate in the investigation and prosecution of any criminal behavior. Anything less will be unacceptable.

Demand that the employees be held accountable for their actions. At minimum they should be terminated, and pending investigation of the voices heard in the video, charged as accessories to this hate crime.

You can also call the Violent Crimes Division of Maryland’s State Attorney’s Office at 410-887-6610 to demand that their investigation include the actions of these employees as accessories.

Before being warned that they “better get out of here” because the police were coming, the two assailants appeared to be trying to drag their victim out into the parking lot to continue their assault. The fact that she was already convulsing wasn’t going to stop them; they were going to continue kicking her in the head until they killed her. This level of violence is typical in assaults on transgender people, one of whom is murdered every month on average in the United States.

Does this shock you?

What did you think was going to happen? There are abundant lessons from history that tell us the result when we permit any group of people to be defined as less than human. It’s not possible to be “neutral” on this question. There is no neutral.

Loudoun County, remove the cancer that is in Sterling. Virginia law is extremely lax with regard to the criteria for removing someone from public office, so much so that he would have to actually be convicted of kicking a woman in the head himself. The burden is on you, the voters and people of conscience.