It's not a bugfix - it's an enhancement, which no one else has asked for. Given that there's a possible thread safety issue, I see no strong reason to commit a patch to call syslog. After all, you have a patch which works for you; and there is no strong demand in the community for a patch to use syslog. Keep using your patch, where's the problem with that?

I look at bug reports and patches and fix/apply after assessing whether or not the change is an improvement. I don't accept all patches or bug reports as valid - but I don't reject things out of hand, either. This particular patch might make things worse if thread safefy issues aren't thought through properly - then it would be me, not you, who would have to take on any additional support burden. While I can't speak for the Python library as a whole, I have certainly taken a fair amount of trouble to make the logging package thread-safe.

Take a look at the patches list for Python - there are quite a lot of patches which aren't accepted and haven't been accepted for a long time because that's the committer's judgement. Some may get accepted in the future, others will not.