This is an opinion column.
Lord have mercy, it’s like the crazy crept up on us in the night. While we were supposed to be asleep.
The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos are people too. Popsicle people, maybe, but people.
So when somebody drops a vial of humans in a lab, it’s not a cleanup on aisle one, anymore. It’s a wrongful death suit. We’re just a hop, skip and bump away from somebody getting locked up in Alabama’s death camp prisons for knocking over a test tube.
Is it just me? Tell me it’s not just me.
Alabama lawmakers are pushing bills that would protect themselves, that would give them the illusion of power over history, that would keep them from having to deal with real problems, that would make sure the state of Alabama will continue to feel unwelcome to any of those weirdos.
That’s the goal.
We have a bill to make it a felony, punishable by years in Alabama’s already overcrowded prisons, to help sick or old or disabled people vote.
That’s Senate Bill Numero Uno, SB1, the Top Dog. It has already passed the Senate and now moves on to the House. This bill is done in the name – wink, wink – of preventing widespread voter fraud, which isn’t real. Which means the bill, ironically, sounds a little bit like fraud itself, since its only real purpose is to prevent people from voting.
We also have a bill to make the Alabama Department of Archives and History regret that decision to let somebody talk for an hour one time last year about Alabama LGBTQ history.
SB77 by Sen. Chris Elliott – not the guy from Schitt’s Creek but the one who might just put us up it – would replace the Archives’ board members with political appointees who would make sure that Alabama history is politicized, and that those people don’t get a voice in it anymore. One time was too many.
History, as Alabama well knows, is not for the Tim Cooks, the Jim Naborses, the Truman Capotes of the world. It’s for those who want to pretend history is a world only they are comfortable with.
Another Elliott special, SB10, would make library boards subject to the whims of local politicians. After all, you never know when some kid might want to check out a book about the Enola Gay, Gay Talese, or anything by Marie-Louise Gay. That bill passed the Senate faster than a bootleg copy of An Amish Romance. It is headed for the House.
We’ve got a bill by a cattle farmer from Mobile that would make it a felony – again, prison time – to sell lab-made meat in Alabama. Because – gross – and because that’s not how we do it in Alabama, apparently. When in doubt, ban it, jail it, lock it up. And maybe because cows, and the people who grow them, are people too.
We have bills to let parents hover over teachers and monitor every page in classrooms, bills to give money to people who leave public schools for private ones, a bill that would bar companies that expect employees to support diversity, energy efficiency, pay equity or “ethical or sustainable purchasing choices” from getting state contracts.
Better to fight to preserve the rose-colored past than to try to stave off a red-hot future. It’s not like climate change is gonna hurt those embryos.
I guess none of this is surprising.
The Alabama GOP, in advance of this session, reported its own poll that found almost half of the state’s Republicans thought the most important issue facing our state was “protecting children from woke policies.”
That’s way easier than fixing prisons, stemming murders, improving healthcare and slowing the closing of rural hospitals, stopping the brain drain or simply acknowledging that it’s ok to be different.
I guess it explains the bill that would make ethics crimes for Alabama politicians, well, not crimes anymore. Feel free, fellas, to take gifts, hire your cousins and steal around the state.
After all, there is nothing more woke than holding politicians accountable.
