This is an opinion column.
There are decent people in Alabama. I know this because I’ve grown up around them. I hang out with them. Work with them. I’ve gone to church with them, and before I became a parent, I drank a lot of beer with them. I see them every day.
There are a few, even, in the Alabama Legislature.
But now, I worry. I worry whether the decency I’ve seen can counterbalance the meanness.
The meanness of the majority of our lawmakers.
It was meanness Thursday in Montgomery, cruelty toward folks who don’t deserve it. Cruelty toward children. Bullying from grown men and grown women to score political points, to pacify constituents whipped up into a frenzy by talk radio jerks and cable TV hatemongers.
Perhaps lawmakers realized an anti-CRT bill was a little too on-the-nose for Alabama — especially after Sen. Gerald Allen, R-Tuscaloosa, single-handedly killed a bill to permit the renaming of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Instead, on the last day of the 2022 session, Republican lawmakers channeled their meanness at trans kids and LGBTQ youth.
Already two anti-trans bills had inched their way through the legislative maze. It was an easy place to put the hate that needed a place to go.
The first bill, from Rep. Scott Stadthagen, R-Hartselle, would force trans students to use the bathrooms of their gender at birth — a so-called “bathroom bill.”
The second bill, from Rep. Wes Allen, R-Troy (whose dad is the one who killed the Edmund Pettus Bridge renaming) would make it a crime for doctors to treat trans youth with hormones, puberty blockers or surgery.
But that wasn’t enough for Alabama lawmakers.
When the bathroom bill made its way to the Senate floor, Republican lawmakers there decided to give it an LGBTQ-hate upgrade. An amendment from Sen. Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville, expanded the bill to prohibit elementary teachers from talking about sexuality or gender in school.
Alabama took Florida’s Don’t-Say-Gay hate as an example to follow.
For the sake of understanding how haphazard these bills are, it’s worth considering how these two things might work together — or not. Let’s suppose an elementary school student goes in the “wrong” bathroom. How exactly is a teacher or a principal supposed to explain to the student what they’d done without breaking the very law they are supposed to enforce?
But hate never wastes time trying to make sense.
These lawmakers — and let’s be clear, we’re talking about the Republicans — have little regard for the kids they want to legislate back into the closet. Heck, they don’t give a rip for their queer colleagues in the Legislature.
When Neil Rafferty, D-Birmingham, tried to ask Allen questions about his bill, Allen stubbornly refused to answer.
“It’s your 10 minutes,” Allen repeated every time Rafferty asked him a question.
Allen’s contempt for Rafferty, the only openly gay Alabama lawmaker, was clear.
Rafferty turned his attention to the rest of the chamber and pleaded with them to kill the bill.
“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.”
An exasperated Rafferty told Republicans he’d beg them to kill the bill, but other Democrats in the room hollered for him to hold his head up.
Don’t you beg, they said.
“You’re right, I’m not begging,” he said. “What’s going to happen is going to happen. Just don’t you dare call me a friend after this.”
That last bit was an echo from two weeks before, when House Republicans pushed a “divisive concepts” bill through a vote over Black Democrats’ objections — when Black lawmakers warned that they had limits, too.
In addition to being the only openly gay lawmaker in the Legislature, Rafferty is the only white Democrat in the House, and many of his Black colleagues saw parallels between the struggle of queer Alabamians and Black Alabamians.
These bills are designed to sanitize Alabama, state Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa, said.
“Whether it be through critical race theory, whether it be through prosecuting people for protesting or whether it be prosecuting doctors for trying to help somebody — you want life in Alabama to be so difficult so that people that don’t look like you or think like you or act like you go somewhere else,” England said.
Or in the parlance of George Wallace, If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?
The sad thing is, many do. Never mind attracting jobs and workers to Alabama — the focus of business elites who try to put the brakes on this sort of thing.
We’re losing homegrown talent.
A survey last year by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education found that one-in-four Alabama college graduates planned to leave the state after graduation and 43 percent hadn’t made up their minds.
“Respondents had the lowest impressions of Alabama’s political and social environment, salaries, acceptance of diversity, and overall reputation,” the survey found.
This bile spewing from Montgomery is driving our young people away — and not just trans kids looking for a place that doesn’t treat them like trash, but also their friends who love them and know better.
And too many lawmakers in Montgomery are fine with that.
“This bill puts a sign on the state sign that says go somewhere else because we don’t want you here,” England said.
Alabama, the sundown state.
These bills, like many others, invite anyone who doesn’t like Alabama the way it is to get the hell out.
Well, to hell with that.
There are decent people here in Alabama. I know them. When the rest of America tries to write off Alabama, I’ll always remind those folks elsewhere that there are good people here who haven’t given up.
Because the best answer when someone asks that question — why don’t you move – is “No.”
The worst thing you can do to people who don’t want you here is to stand.
We might have to live for a while with these garbage laws — if Gov. Kay Ivey signs them, and she will — but by God, some decent folks are going to stay.
Don’t run.
Hold your ground. Don’t let meanness win without a fight.
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary. You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.
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