The Feds, Civil Rights and Camp Sister Spirit : Gay rights: The Mississippi case shows the need for a law.

Feds in Mississippi, sent there to protect beleaguered citizens from intimidation based on prejudice and an escalating climate of threats and potential violence. Wait--didn’t we solve this problem in the 1960s? So what’s with Attorney General Janet Reno sending federal mediators to respond to harassment of a local couple?

The Hensons live in Ovett, a hamlet of 1,200. They run a women’s camp there called Sister Spirit, which they have dedicated to the training of feminists and civil-rights activists. Nobody has accused the Hensons of anything criminal. But they have been subjected to anonymous phone calls, threatening letters, jeers and random gunfire from their neighbors. A bomb has been exploded in front of their gate and a dead dog found draped over their mailbox. The climate of intimidation has intensified with two meetings led by Baptists ministers to raise money toward forcing the Hensons out of their former pig farm.

The clue to what has some of their neighbors so riled up may be that their locked and guarded gate is painted lavender. The Hensons are lesbians, married in their own eyes and presumably in the sight of whatever higher power they cherish, but not in the eyes of the law or their neighbors. Brenda and Wanda Henson have committed no offense, but their neighbors fear that Sister Spirit will become a regional center of gay activism.

Paul Walley, a lawyer advising the groups attempting to purge Ovett of the Hensons, explained that “the area is a conservative religious community that has a standard based on biblical morality. Residents of Camp Sister Spirit reject that standard and have a radical agenda that would seek to change our way of life.” Their biblical moral precedent is apparently not the injunction of Jesus of Nazareth to love thy neighbor as thyself.

Enter the Justice Department. Federal mediators commonly respond to threats against racial and ethnic minorities, but this is apparently the first response to a sexual-orientation hate crime. Mediators have met with the two sides in hopes of easing tensions.

Jones County Sheriff Maurice Hooks welcomed the mediators and defended his own record: “We’re trying to protect their rights.” The difficulty is that lesbians and gay men have no firmly established rights.

It is heartening to have the Justice Department send mediators to Mississippi to protect citizens’ rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But the case reminds us all of the pressing need for a national gay civil-rights bill.