"I understand the demands of Justice and the equality of the LGBT community. I will ensure that the statutes that protect their civil rights and safety are respected in their entirety.”
+In an emotional speech, Obama says he will leave a better country for LGBT people
The conservative senator Jeff Sessions, chosen by Donald Trump as the next Secretary of Justice, promised yesterday to protect the rights of minorities, especially black people, in a parliamentary session interrupted by protesters accusing him of racism.
“I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the terrible impact that incessant and systematic discrimination, as well as restrictions on the right to vote, have had on our African-American brothers and sisters,” Sessions said at the start of a confirmation hearing at the Senate, closely monitored by the media.
“We must move forward and never go back. I understand the complaints about justice and the equality of the LGBT community. I will ensure that the statutes that protect your civil rights and safety are respected in their entirety.”
At the beginning of the session, two men dressed in the clothes of the racist organization Ku Klux Klan, with a hood and white tunic, ironically thanked Trump that the conservative senator is in a position to be the next attorney general.
“You can’t arrest me, I’m a white man,” said one of the protesters when he was expelled by the police. The session was continually interrupted by other groups. “No to Trump, no to the KKK, no to fascist America,” shouted two other men, one of them black, before being expelled from the room by police officers.
The appointment generated resistance due to his history of accusations of racism in the 1980s, when he was a federal prosecutor in Alabama, the former heart of racial segregation in the USA.
In 1986 he said a white lawyer was a “disgrace to his race” for defending black clients. And he would have called a black prosecutor “boy”, a term with a strong racist connotation in the United States. All of this prevented his confirmation to the position of federal judge. Sessions addressed the controversy by denying accusations of not having protected the right to vote for black voters when he was prosecutor and of having sympathies for the KKK. “These accusations are false,” he said.
Sessions also pledged to make the fight against the arrival of illegal people into the country “his priority.” “We will prosecute those who repeatedly violate our borders. It will be my priority to address these crises vigorously, effectively and immediately,” he said.
Sessions, 70, was the first senator to support Donald Trump during the Republican Party primary campaign, and gave full support to the president-elect's plan to build a wall on the border with Mexico and expel millions of illegal people.
