This is an opinion column.
The switch happened quickly — literally overnight.
One day in 2022, Alabama Republican lawmakers were on the warpath against critical race theory.
A day later, they had set CRT aside and took aim at a new target — all things LGBTQ.
It had seemed the 2022 regular session would end with a brutal fight in the Alabama House over the anti-CRT (aka “divisive concepts”) bill. The debate over the CRT bill had been raw and personal, but the Alabama House passed the bill over loud objections from Black lawmakers.
“I’m realizing, when you talk to me and tell me, ‘Oh man, you’re a good guy and I like you,’ you don’t,” said House minority leader, Rep. Anthony Daniels, told his white Republican colleagues.
When quizzed by their colleagues, the sponsor failed basic questions about Black history. When asked what the Middle Passage was, state Rep. Ed Oliver, R-Dadeville, said, “Something from 1619, maybe?”
With one day left in the session, the bill advanced to the state Senate, but when the Senate Rules Committee produced the next day’s agenda, called the calendar, CRT wasn’t on it.
Instead, two bills that had stalled in committee for nearly the whole three-month session sprung from the shadows. Their quick passage was nothing less than an ambush.
The first was a bill to imprison doctors for up to 10 years for prescribing gender-affirming medical treatments to transgender youth, and another that both banned transgender youth from their preferred school bathrooms and also prohibited discussions about LGBTQ issues in schools.
When those bills reached the House floor, the vote still split along party lines, but this time it was the only openly gay state lawmaker, Rep. Neil Rafferty, D-Birmingham, who pleaded with his colleagues. Other Democrats were conspicuously quiet.
“It’s hard enough growing up being different,” Rafferty said. “It’s even harder growing up being different, and then have a state legislature, your elected officials, the leaders of this state, put a target on children’s backs, put a target on the parents’ backs, and once again get in the middle of their decisions.”
The bills passed anyway, and Gov. Kay Ivey signed them into law.
Lawmakers who backed the shift suffered no political repercussions. One of the sponsors, state Rep. Wes Allen, R-Troy, leveraged it to win a higher office, Alabama secretary of state. Allen, who as a Pike County probate judge defied federal courts by refusing to give marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is now the state’s top elections officer.
Let’s be clear about what happened here. Republican lawmakers, in a rare moment of lucidity, figured out that running slap over Black Democrats, session after session, was a bad look for them. This is Alabama and the comparisons to Wallace are always close by.
So they picked a new target. Like schoolyard bullies, they sought out someone smaller to pick on, preferably someone who didn’t have 27 percent of Alabama voters behind them.
It’s only a matter of time before the bullies return to their old, favorite target, race, but for the moment, they’ve found a new, smaller, more vulnerable someone to abuse.
LGBTQ is target No. 1.
Last month, lawmakers targeted the Alabama Department of Archives and History for hosting a lecture on LGBTQ history in Alabama.
The monthly lunchtime series, called Food for Thought, invites academics to speak on various topics and it’s hardly the sort of thing that draws notice. In fact, a speaker from the same organization, the Birmingham-based Invisible Histories Project, spoke at the archives last year without drawing any attention at all.
That, it seems, was a different time.
Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, and Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, attacked the Archives for using state money for the program.
The only thing there is, the Archives didn’t use state money. The Food for Thought series is funded by grants from the Alabama Humanities Alliance, which got that money from federal funds, not state tax dollars. Kiel and Stadthagen would have known had they simply asked, but learning facts before jumping to conclusions is not the objective here.
Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, did know where the money came from. Archives and History director Steve Murray told him when Elliott demanded the program be canceled, a public records request revealed.
But that wasn’t good enough for Elliott, who now plans to introduce legislation to cut $5 million from the Archives’ budget, punishment for hosting a program the state didn’t fund in the first place.
But saving tax dollars was never the issue here. Lawmakers needed a new hate target. They wanted to act like George Wallace without looking like George Wallace.
Like that old Alabama ghoul, they’ll inevitably wash their hands of all this when someone else puts their hate into action. Already, masked KKKhakis from Patriot Front protested a Prattville Pride event. It’s a matter of time before someone gets hurt, and when that happens none of these dolts will accept a lick of responsibility.
But they need to know pivoting from one out-group to another is old Alabama politics, too.
In 1966, after decades of unbroken white supremacy, staunch segregationists began to soften their rhetoric, including George Wallace. The Voting Rights Act had opened the state’s voter rolls to more than 200,000 newly registered Black voters.
Suddenly, Wallace aimed his flamethrower at communists, instead.
“The reason he’s been talking about Communism is that there aren’t 228,000 registered Communists in Alabama,” Richmond Flowers, the state attorney general and candidate for governor, joked then.
Wallace hadn’t found his soul in some sort of Road to Damascus moment. His political formula was always us-versus-them, and that never changed.
And that formula is still very much in use today.
Our elected officials use it because it works — for them. But this isn’t leadership and the officials beating their chests over this aren’t leaders.
Just the same old bullies.
Stay Connected
Twitter
Facebook
Plugin created by StressFree Sites