Roy Moore - A Referendum on Alabama's Identity

Alabama Capitol

Years ago my first job out of law school took me to Mobile, Alabama, where I lived and worked for four (4) years.  I found the people to be conservative, but gracious and nowhere deserving of the horrible reputation that Alabama had in much of the rest of the country (when visiting my former wife's family in New York City, it was always interesting to see people's reactions when we said we lived in Alabama). In the legal realm, the state had updated its rules of civil procedure and was actually much more modern than Virginia's to this day very outdated rules governing court actions.   Mobile, with its Catholic majority population was very different from the Baptist dominated northern part of the state.   Most importantly, the Christofascists had not yet hijacked the Alabama Republican Party.  But this latter event came to pass and now, Alabama has become a place I barely recognize, all thanks to the evangelicals/Christofascists.  Graciousness has given way to extremism in all too many contexts and, as a piece in the Washington Post notes, the state is posed to engage in a referendum on its identity and how it will be perceived by decent, moral people across the country and world.  The referendum centers on Roy Moore, a foul person in my view and a disgrace to Alabama.  Here are article highlights:

For many Alabama voters, unaccustomed to a competitive election and the national attention that has come with it, the bitter showdown between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones has become something more personal than a race to fill an open Senate seat. It is now a referendum on the state’s identity.

Supporters of Jones say with concern that a win Tuesday by the firebrand Moore would derail the state’s efforts to escape its painful history and rebrand as a forward-thinking place welcoming to Fortune 500 companies and a highly educated workforce. And they express a nagging feeling that a Moore victory would be a deflating sign that Alabama remains beholden to its past.

“You travel across the country and you say ‘Alabama,’ and something goes right across people’s eyes every time,” said retired actor Jonathan Fuller, a 61-year-old Democrat, as he shopped at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket in the suburbs south of Birmingham. “I don’t want to apologize anymore for where I’m from because there is this pocket of stubbornness in my state.”

Supporters of Moore, meanwhile, see his candidacy as a conduit for their rejection of the national media and political elites who they believe unfairly caricature their home state as a cultural backwater. They shrug off the notion that sexual misconduct allegations against Moore — allegations that some see as a fabrication by outsiders — should make a difference. . . . He said people outside of Alabama “have no right to judge us.”

The vivid contrast between the two candidates — Moore, 70, with his apocalyptic warnings about Muslims and gay rights, against Jones, a low-key 63-year-old lawyer best known for prosecuting Ku Klux Klan members who planned the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham — has put in sharp relief the idea that the results could speak volumes about Alabama to the rest of the country — and to itself.

One pivotal group on Tuesday will be voters who feel caught between these two visions and must pick a side, especially ­Republican-leaning voters who feel pulled between their traditional values and a desire to turn the page on the uglier parts of Alabama’s past.

“We’ve got a lot of good here, a lot of people who died for equal rights. And we’ve got a lot of people who are stuck in 1930, and that’s not going to change,” Phillip Hutchins, a 67-year-old Democrat and retired aircraft worker, said last week outside a grocery store in Titusville, a heavily black neighborhood in Birmingham.

Business-minded white Republicans — a bloc that sees itself as modern and puts an emphasis on education, commerce and tradition — have been uneasy about Moore. They have recoiled, too, at the cascade of controversies that have gripped the state this year, making the current race a culmination of various discomforts rather than a sudden drama.

The competition with other states for corporate investment is fierce, and state business executives have watched closely what happened in North Carolina after its ban on gender-neutral bathrooms.  Jones has courted the business establishment, many of them Republicans, on both moral and economic grounds, urging them to abandon their partisan instincts to protect the state’s economy and reputation.

But Jones, who supports abortion rights and whose campaign headquarters has a Planned Parenthood poster on its wall, has struggled to win over Republicans such as JoAnn Turner, a 71-year-old nurse who lives in Vestavia Hills, a mostly white Birmingham suburb.

“I’ve been in Alabama for 42 years, and I’m so tired of the publicity being so bad. It’s not who we are, and it’s embarrassing,” Turner said, . . . “All that said,” Turner added, “I can’t vote for Roy Moore, and I can’t vote for Doug Jones. . . . . Turner plans to write in Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.). . . .

[V]eteran Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) have remained wary of the former judge who was twice removed from the state Supreme Court — and have called the allegations against him credible and disturbing.  Shelby has opted to cast a write-in vote, telling The Washington Post that he is anxious about how a Moore victory would affect the corporate world’s impressions of Alabama. 

Outside of Birmingham and in rural towns to the east — home to massive evangelical churches and family-owned barbecue restaurants that puff black smoke out of chimneys — Moore’s support is heartier, particularly in his home town of Gadsden on the Coosa River. . . . Otis Dupree, a 53-year-old retired chicken-plant worker who works part time at the Burger King in Gadsden, said he is “disgusted” with the city’s embrace of Moore.

More than 100 miles southwest on the state’s flagship campus — the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa — hundreds of students in athletic clothing and T-shirts stream out of dorm buildings and sorority mansions across the street from the school’s beloved Bryant-Denny Stadium.

As with the men and women in Vestavia Hills, many of them are financially stable and white — and Republican in a cultural sense as much as ideologically. They see themselves as Alabama’s future and are eager to define it.  Roy Moore isn’t part of that plan, according to Ella Jernigan, a 19-year-old Republican student who’s studying marketing. . . .  I can’t stand us getting pinned now as rednecks or uneducated.”  She added, “Every time you think we’re going forward, something like Roy Moore sets us back.”