By Josh Moon
Alabama Political Reporter
You’re liars.
I’m talking to the bigots of this State, the ones clinging to Confederate monuments and protesting a rainbow flag in a high school classroom and traveling to white-whiners marches all over the country.
You’re liars.
You know it. I know it.
Society has progressed around you and your intolerance is no longer publicly acceptable, so you lie.
You lie about why you want to keep Confederate memorials. You lie about why you’re so angry at minorities. You lie about why you hate gay people.
You lie so much that I’m not even sure you even recognize it as a lie anymore.
But it is. And in unguarded moments, you give the game away. You slip and let your true feelings come shining through.
In those moments, the Confederate statues aren’t about remembering history so we don’t repeat it or about teaching our young people what happened. Instead, they’re symbols of great men who should be honored because they fought against the Northern invaders, and to hell with any black person who thinks otherwise.
In those moments, the protest of a rainbow flag isn’t about ensuring a politics-free classroom setting for the kids or even doing God’s will. Instead, it’s about personal preference and what individuals have decided is icky or personally unacceptable.
Take what happened this week in Auburn, at Auburn High, for example.
A teacher came under fire – anonymous fire – for placing a picture of a gay pride flag on a poster promoting diversity. The teacher is the sponsor of the EDUCATE Club at the school, a club that promotes acceptance and inclusivity.
Now, most people would see such a thing and think: “Good idea. With today’s bullying issues, we could use a lot more inclusion.”
But not a group of anonymous parents and students at the school. They started a petition to bring down the display, because, they said, there would be protests over the Confederate flag or a “heterosexual flag.”
I assume a “heterosexual flag” is black or camouflage and has a No. 3 on it.
See, they can’t help themselves.
They legitimately can’t comprehend why it’s OK for you to fly a flag that tells people to love one another when they can’t fly a flag telling people to hate each other.
And so, out pours dozens of absurd analogies, such as, “If the teacher can fly a gay flag, other teachers should be allowed to have Christian flags.”
That’s something that was actually said to me. Because apparently Christianity is now the opposite of love and inclusivity (I think I read the wrong Bible, because mine had a guy named Jesus in it who was pretty into all that liberal, love-and-accept-each-other crap).
But we know the Bible-based reasons are nonsense, too. On the same page as that Leviticus verse the bigots run to for comfort is a command not to eat shellfish. And yet, these same churchies can’t get into Red Lobster fast enough during lobsterfest.
But don’t worry, homophobes, because as bad as you are, you can’t match the lies of the Confederate monument groupies.
These folks have been playing this “aw shucks, I’m not a racist, I just love my heritage” game so long that the lies just spill out with ease.
Earlier this week, a local Montgomery activist, Karen Jones, went before the Montgomery County School Board to request that they explore moving the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from in front of the high school that bears his name.
You would have thought that she asked to burn all the copies of “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Under the Montgomery Advertiser’s Facebook post of a video recording of Jones making the request, there were hundreds of comments, most of them so racist it would make a Klansman blush.
There were comments calling the black students at Lee “thugs,” posts questioning the morals of all blacks, posts asking why blacks can’t “just get over it” and a post from a white, 20-something girl saying she was “tired of them trying to take over everything.”
And all Jones did was ask that the statue be moved to the First White House of the Confederacy – a museum.
Because see, it’s not about history. Not really.
It’s about fear. Their fear – of change, of differences, of equality, of a level playing field. They know that their reasons for pushing people away and advocating for discrimination are made-up nonsense that mostly lack enough logic to fool a toddler.
But it’s all they’ve got. So they just keep lying.
