When it comes to Alabama, you don’t know shit

Alabama is a national laughingstock again.

That’s all right. We’re used to it. Alabama is good at two things: Football (teams from the state have won six of the last 10 BCS or CFP national championships) and food (Birmingham’s Highlands Bar & Grill has won multiple James Beard awards, including best restaurant in 2018).

But when Alabama’s state government decided to pass the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, we again became the butt of every joke from liberal commentators and pundits around the country.

Do we deserve that?

Well, our state government certainly does.

But when so-called liberals make fun of Alabama, they don’t differentiate between the lousy state government and the people who live here. Those holier (and smarmier)-than-thou “liberals” are unwittingly heaping dung on some of the most marginalized people in the country: Poor Black people, and especially poor Black women. The reason Alabama doesn’t have a credibly accused child molester in the U.S. Senate is that Black women propelled Doug Jones’ campaign across the finish line.

Alabama had not elected a Democratic senator in 25 years. Not since Howell Heflin retired and Richard Shelby switched parties. Before that, though, Alabama sent a mix of Republicans and Democrats to Congress.

But now Republicans have a stranglehold on the state — and Dems kinda have themselves to blame.

In 1986, when conservative Dem Charlie Graddick — who was serving as Alabama’s attorney general at the time — won a narrow runoff election victory for the Dem nomination for governor. The loser of that runoff, Lieutenant Governor Bill Baxley, challenged the results of the runoff, saying that Graddick had encouraged Republicans to “cross over” and vote for him “illegally.” The upshot of that challenge was that Baxley took the Dem nomination and Republican Guy Hunt won the general election by a comfortable margin (56 percent of the vote).

Graddick was seen as something of an insurgent in Alabama Democratic politics. But he had wide appeal across the state as a man of good character and integrity. By seeming to negate the outcome of an election, the Democratic party in Alabama lost the faith of the voters.

Since then, the last elected Democrat to the governorship was Don Siegelman, who won in 1999 and left office in January 2003 after losing to Republican Bob Riley.

Add to that the “leadership” of Democrats like Joe Reed and Nancy Worley in the Alabama Democratic Conference/Alabama Democratic Party, who have been ineffective and inept at best, and power-hungry, ethics-less despots at worst. Take Alabama’s most recent election, where Reed tried to strongarm money out of candidates like Tabitha Isner. The ADP also rigged an election for its leadership, allowing Reed’s handpicked successor, Worley, to take the helm of the organization.

Let me explain to you how inept and ineffective the ADC has been: NO DEMOCRAT HAS WON A STATEWIDE ELECTION SINCE 2002. THAT’S 17 YEARS. Democratic candidates like Kari Powell, Cara McClure, and Heather Milam crisscrossed the state, stumping for votes. They were demonstrably better candidates than their GOP counterparts. They put in hours and hours of sweat equity — just like many other Dem candidates — only to have the ADP offer zero support.

Reed & Worley’s underhanded tactics were finally too much for the Democratic National Committee, who ordered the ADC to hold a new election for its leadership. Isner is one of two candidates challenging Worley for the leadership of the ADP.

Now, I am more than familiar with all of Alabama’s unique challenges. Alabama ranks ninth in poverty, nationally; 1 in 4 Alabamians is functionally illiterate; we have some of the most abject poverty in the developed world; 26 percent of the state lives below the poverty line. That number is even higher for families with single mothers: 51 percent. Our property taxes are among the lowest in the nation, but we add sales taxes to grocery sales. Some 152,000+ of our residents are unemployed. Countless others are underemployed. We’re near the bottom of the rankings for education and opportunity. In suburban Birmingham, Shelby County went broke. Went. Fucking. Broke. Our schools are so under-funded that teachers who want their classrooms to be adequately equipped must buy that equipment out of pocket–with no guarantee of recompense. The state is broken–and everyone, regardless of their political slant, can see it. They just don’t seem willing to do anything about it.

So what does the Alabama legislature want to discuss? How to make abortions more difficult to get. Because that’s clearly the biggest problem facing the state today.

Want to address abortion? Make sure health classes teach the importance of condoms or other birth control in order to cut down unwanted pregnancies. Educate kids about sex. Tell them that condoms help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Hell, wanna really be proactive? Provide birth control, both oral contraceptives for women and condoms for men. Guess what happens when you do those things? Abortion rates plummet.

We’re so damned concerned about abortion, but the very churchy types who protest abortion would cluck their tongues and look down on the teenage mothers raising children. Those children, I might add, who would be nothing more than “a drain on taxpayers.” They’re subhuman, you see? Not even people, just little crying, needy parasites that feed off of the state.

There are far more important things than abortion that Alabama should address. Here’s a quick laundry list of the challenges Alabama faces: How do we make our schools (and municipalities) solvent? How do we improve our literacy ratings? How do we improve our school systems overall to make our children more competitive with the rest of the country, not to mention the rest of the world? How do we improve our jobs situation? How do we ensure our children get a chance at a secondary education, whether that’s college or trade school? How do we stop taxpayer dollars from fleeing to GA & FL to play the lottery? Why do our best and brightest leave for other states as soon as they can? How do we ease the tax burden on the poorest among us while ensuring the richest pay their fair share?

Yeah, Alabama has a lot of issues. And we talk funny. It’s easy to look down on someone with a Southern accent. It’s easy to make fun of us as sibling-fuckers or uneducated, toothless hillbillies. But when you do that, you aren’t just hurting the white power structure that has slowly strangled this state. You are also hurting the marginalized: the poor, the LGBTQIAP+, Black people and other people of color.

And that, my dear liberal friends, is. on. you. No, Alabama ain’t California or New York. But it CAN be a great place, and there are great and wonderful people who call it home.

Later today, thousands of Alabamians across multiple cities will march against the abortion ban that was signed into law here. When you make fun of Alabama, you’re making fun of them, too.

So for the liberals and the Democrats and the pundits and everyone else who has given up on Alabama over the last 25 years, who consigned this state as a lost cause; for the people who’ve never set foot here, who don’t understand this place and don’t WANT to understand it: If you’re not down here in this state fighting the fight — if you don’t have skin in the goddamned game — shut your piehole, because you don’t know shit.