Mount Pleasan, SC – Antisemitic flyers have once again surfaced in Mount Pleasant.
This time in town councilmember Daniel Brownstein’s mailbox. It made him uneasy, and he eventually learned that a fellow councilmember also received one.
“It was very creepy to receive it at home,” Brownstein said.
Initially, Brownstein said he was apprehensive about telling people what he found.
“I thought doing so would make me more of a target or potentially make town council more of a target,” he said. “Then, the more that I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that this is something that the public should see because this hate exists everywhere, not just in Mount Pleasant.”
Recently, Mount Pleasant Town Council voted to move forward on a hate crime ordinance, which would create stricter penalties for nonviolent hate crimes.
Leaders are also working on an ordinance to prohibit the distribution of handbills and flyers at private homes.
Meanwhile, at the state level, Representative Wendell Gilliard has tried to get a hate crime bill passed for years.
“When these local municipalities even come up with the resolution to say that they want to hate crime law locally, it sends a message to the House and Senate,” Gilliard said. “It tells us that we better get off our butts and do what’s right by we, the people, and not the party.”
Gilliard believes the state still needs its own law.
“If you had a hate crime law in this state, now you put us in a position to expedite cases because the federal government, they have what we call a backlog of hate crime cases,” Gilliard said. “We have to be in a position that we could expedite in our own cases and get these things out of the way and get it resolved for the people.”
Mount Pleasant would be the fifth community in the state to have a hate crime ordinance if it passes.
Second readings are expected in January.
On the state level, the hate crime bill is in the Senate subcommittee.
