By Josh Moon
Alabama Political Reporter
From the bottom of my heart, Roy Moore, thank you.
Sometimes, in America — and especially in the South — we tend to get a little complacent, a little too comfortable, almost in a daze-like state, where we’re simply walking through life accepting the world we inhabit every day for the way it is.
It’s sort of like … have you ever encountered a wild animal that suffered an injury — a broken limb or some sort of deformity — and to compensate for it, the animal learned to walk, stand and run in an oddly-contorted way? But because it’s been living that way for so long, it doesn’t realize now that something is wrong — it’s just regular life for the animal?
Well, that was Alabama up until the last month.
A deformed state, just making its way through the day, slouched over and limping, one arm dragging, with slurred speech.
And we thought it’s just the way it was.
Then you came along, Roy.
The for this screwed up place. You hit the national stage, spewing crazy and pushing a shopping cart full of hate, and the rest of America took one look and said, “Hey, why is that Alabama running like that?”mascot
Of course, we didn’t know any better.
Hell, we thought it was normal for your Governor to get caught up in an affair with a 40-year-younger aide, complete with publicly-released sexts, and then be forced to resign over campaign finance crimes, at the same time as a previous governor was being released from federal prison and the current House Speaker was awaiting prison.
That’s just the way we lived here, with our political appendage twisted up behind our backs and slapping us backwards as we tried to move on.
Up until you decided to take this Senate thing seriously, Roy, we thought it normal that in a state with record poverty, there were mega-churches with gaudy furnishings, multiple pastors earning high six figures and multi-million-dollar “building funds.”
We never bothered to ask much at all about these churches and what was going on in and around them. How there were allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct at some, a guy convicted of trying to cover up child molestation gainfully employed by another and a whole bunch that have been routinely violating tax laws by advocating for political issues or candidates.
And maybe this is just a personal failing on my part, but I never truly understood just how many “preachers” would gleefully jump at the opportunity to blindly defend anyone credibly accused of child molestation while denigrating the alleged and apparently innocent victims. Nor did I understand just how many — or that there would even be one — “preacher” who would straight out justify the act of molestation.
And maybe we also should have looked a bit harder at the number of churches that preach greed, that condone discrimination, that fill their congregations full of hate and anger, and that would gladly turn Jesus away for being a bleeding-heart libtard.
It took your campaign, Mr. Moore, to bring it to light.
And that’s not all.
The rest of the country also got an up-close look into Alabama’s ever-present race problems. It was particularly helpful when you mentioned that whole thing about America being at its best when we still had slavery, because families were together.
Yeah, sure, we here in Alabama knew that there were people who believed such ignorance, but this was apparently a surprise to the rest of the country.
They responded by pointing out that black families often weren’t together, and then they jumped to the conclusion that you — and others — obviously didn’t even consider the plight of black Americans when longing for the golden age of America. And that mindset, of course, speaks volumes about the problems we still have with race and racism.
Another revelation thanks to you, Roy.
I don’t know that we’ll truly understand all of the good you’ve done for this state until many years down the road. After change is forced by the good people of this state upon the Neanderthal voting bloc that continues to keep us down and embarrass us. After corrections are made in a desperate attempt to keep and lure businesses. After the younger generation of socially conscious, open-minded adults take hold and force out the rednecks.
But a big, bright spotlight has been focused on Alabama and all of its problems over the past month, and I am more certain than ever before that the good people of Alabama are fed up and motivated to do something about the bad people of Alabama.
For that, and for absolutely nothing else, I think we owe you, Roy Moore, a big thank you.
