Sweet home Alabama: Where everyone’s a right-winger

August 26, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

Read the following party platform planks and take a guess at who wrote them:

1. Pass a constitutional amendment confirming that all life is a gift from God and should be protected; and that life begins at conception

2. Require public schools to offer Bible Literacy as part of their curriculum

3. Defeat any efforts to redefine marriage or provide the benefits of marriage to a same-sex union

Sounds like the Texas Republican Party, right? This is the party, after all, that routinely calls separation of church and state a “myth” in its platform.

But the language above does not come from Republicans in Texas. It is an excerpt from the Alabama Democratic Party.

There’s an old saying in politics: If you give people a choice between a Republican and a Republican, chances are the Republican will win the election.

I realize we are talking about Alabama here, and a little God talk in the platform is to be expected. But this language goes way beyond that, venturing into the realm of specific policy proposals. It’s not just generic “God-is-nice” rhetoric. I look at language like this and wonder what about it would inspire a progressive or even moderate Democrat to back the party that issued it.

Take another look at the abortion plank. The “life-begins-at-conception” language, taken to extremes, means that all abortions must be banned, even in cases of rape, incest and threat to the life of the mother. This position is, according to the polls I have seen, held by about 10 percent of the population.

The sad thing is, there is actually some half-decent populism elsewhere in the platform. It talks about repealing a tax on food, which predominantly hits the poor. It calls for increasing the minimum wage and helping small business buy health insurance for employees.

These are issues that could resonate with middle-class voters. It’s too bad the party decided to junk them up with misguided appeals to the religious right. Those folks aren’t going to vote for the Democrats, and such language only serves to alienate the segment of the Alabama electorate that is not obsessed with social issues. There sure isn’t much in this “Faith & Values” section to inspire many mainstream Democrats.

Maybe that helps explain why incumbent Republican Gov. Bob Riley is leading Democrat Lucy Baxley by 20 points.

In the Red corner, a Republican.

In the Blue corner, a Rebublican wanna-be.

Y’know, the comments on letting the South secede from the Union are passé; maybe we should just start eviction proceedings, and kick ’em to the curb. We won’t have to rebuild their buzzillions of dollars’ worth “Let’s-Put-Infrastructure-In-A-Hurricane-Zone” real estate any more. They can print their own money (Monopoly), fund their own highways (dirt roads), build their own commercial aircraft (propellor-driven dirigibles), and print their own textbooks (Bibles with all the pages of the New Testament torn out). If these zealots want their own land, then give it to them. The nation needs to wash its hands of this Theofascist mentality—and the sooner, the better….

  • Of course, platforms are typically written to make the platform committee happy and tend to have little bearing on specific candidates.

    Baxley trails Riley for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that all Lucy really has is a slogan (“I Love Lucy”) and precious little else (as I wrote about here–couple that with low unemployment, economic growth in the state, and a lack of problem in Riley’s administration and it isn’t hard at all to see why Baxley trails.

    Further, Riley has actually shown himself to be, progressive after a fashion–in his first year in office he pushed a comprehensive tax package that would have greatly increased state revenues (it failed at the ballot box). This past year he got through the legislature a tax reform that provided significant tax relief to low-income Alabamians who were paying income taxes on insanely low amounts of revenue (some discussion of that here.)

    As a side note: many Southern (and Western, for that matter) Republicans would find many Northeastern Reps to be essentially Democrats in relative terms, so what you are describing is less a function of the South, per se, as it is a function of the variations in ideological perspective across the country in both parties.

  • It was Alabama Democrats as well — though not the party — that just did the following — from Yahoo News:

    “A Democratic Party committee in Montgomery, Alabama, Thursday night voted to disqualify Patricia Todd, an openly gay candidate for the state Legislature, and the woman she defeated in the primary runoff because both women violated a party rule that party officials said no other candidate has obeyed since 1988. ”

    There is some question whether the brunt of the attack on Todd was because she was a lesbian, or because she was white and won in a ‘black district’ — my guess is both. (Todd says the racial factor was the important one.)

  • Regional prejudice is alive and well. The “South” includes plenty of people like me who are progressive and have been “yellow dog” Democrats all their lives. All southern state legislation is not right-wing trash. Georgia, my state, has allowed 18 year-olds to vote for decades — based partly on the logic that if they can be drafted (at the time, women weren’t drafted, but could also vote at 18). I’m no fan of Zell Miller, but he did create the Hope Scholarship program that is funded by a state lottery that he also created exclusively for educational funding. The Hope program provides free college tuition to students with a “B” average.

    I’m not unrealistic about the South and it’s prejudices and shortcomings, but lumping all southerners together and damning us all for stupidity is offensive to many of us. (As we know, there are no such misdirected moon howlers in other regions of the country.) In fact, that sort of wholesale indictment induced anti-secession non-slaveholders to go to war.

    Having said all that, I agree that parts of the Democratic Alabama platform are absurd and will never be pursued — just like national Democratic platforms ignore planks that are a sop to the left-handed, vision-challenged, Naderesque, Vegetable Rights Folk. Both of them.

  • Please add: “…drafted, they should be allowed to vote.”

    Sorry. I guess we’re dumb after all.

  • Alibubba: How aboutthe 100,000 “anti-secession non-slaveholders” who did indeed go to war – for their country, against the Confederacy? For instance folks like the 1st Alabama Cavalry, US Volunteers, the first American Army unit to have both blacks and whites serve in the same unit?

    Not all “anti-secession non-slaveholders” went along with the traitors just for being “tarred with the same brush.” In fact, in Alabama, in 1861, secession only won 52-48 at the convention. The folks of northern Missisippi, northern Alabama, northeast Georgia and east Tenessee (along with some in western North Carolina) wanted to secede and found the Free State of Nickajack. The “South” that I disagree with is the one that came from the coasts inward. The “South” that migrated down the Allegheny chain were people who never forgot what kind of Americans they were, even when they were called “hillbillies” and “white trash” by the coastal traitors.

  • Tom: I wasn’t clear. I should have written “many” anti-secession non-slaveholders. I didn’t mean to imply “all” of them. As you mention, there was great division in Tennessee, for example. But this was my point — that southerners are not and were not all of the same mind. Still, the Confederate army was composed of men, regardless of their politics, who fought for five years because they sincerely held that their land had been invaded. Legally and philosophically that can be debated, but that’s how they felt.

  • I just spent a few minutes looking for the 2006 Alabama Democratic Party platform. I checked the state party website and the state section of the national website and couldn’t find it there. I googled most combinations of the above words and was not able to find the document on the first several pages. I did find the Madison County Democratic Party platform and Lucy Baxley’s (D cantidate for gov.) platform and neither of them mention these issues. Either I’m really slow or they aren’t really putting it out there. It certainly doesn’t seem to be what the cantidates for statewide office are running on. Alabama Democrats certainly aren’t campaigning against those issues, as I wish they could, but neither do they seem to be campaigning on them.

  • Um… When was that platform written?

    Right after the ’04 loss there was a lot of heart-searching and head-scratching in the Dem party nation-wide, when lots of folks were saying that Dems should tack to the right more (“family values” etc) to reconnect with the base. So a local in Alabama might have taken such advice to heart…

  • Democrats do need to appeal to mainstream social values. I don’t think any of the state platform language is extreme but rather mainstream especially in a socially traditionalist state like Alabama. The hard-line religious right folks are not likely to vote Democrat, but we must win back a decent share of religious voters. That means demonstrating that Democrats have an open door to those who are pro-life and not hostile to traditional values or religion.

    Most of the public on a national level isn’t strongly pro-life or pro-choice but rather somewhere in between. Voters in the South and Middle America are not going to favor a Democratic Party that embraces things like late term abortion. The vast majority of voters including Democrats in the South and a lot of other places oppose gay marriage. And I don’t see anything wrong with teaching the Bible as literature. If we Democrats are ever going to become a majority party again, ourl focus must be on the concerns of working families rather than exotic social issues.

  • Voters in the South and Middle America are not going to favor a Democratic Party that embraces things like late term abortion. The vast majority of voters including Democrats in the South and a lot of other places oppose gay marriage. And I don’t see anything wrong with teaching the Bible as literature. — Right Democrat

    A lot of those divisive non-issues can be avoided; if you look at Jim Webb’s website (dull as it is ), he has a plateful of issues without *once* mentioning abortion or gay rights (or flag burning). So, until someone *asks*, why even mention it, much less spell it out in the official platform?

    “Bible Literacy” and “Bible as Literature” are not one and the same thing. Nor is making “Bible Literacy” part of a public school (presumably on a level *below* college) curriculum something to consider lightly, even if they were.

    It’s true that the “plank” says it’d be “an offering”, not a compulsory subject. But, except at the college level, kids don’t get much choice regarding their literature/English courses; it’s not as if one group could pick “Greek Drama” and another “Bible as Lit” as their subject of study. No, once Bible Literacy creeps into the school curriculum, it’s going to be compulsory and not at all taught “as lit”. It’d be more “as writ”. And “there lies the (toxic) dog buried”, as they say in Poland…

  • A footnote to my comment above. Apparently the Alabama State Democratic Party has overruled the local officials and has reinstated Patricia Todd as a candidate — which, since there is no Republican opposition, means as the winner and new State Legislator.

  • Oh, the oppostion of Joe Reed (the black vice-chairman of the Alabama Democratic party and chair of the black Alabama Democratic Conference) was purely racial. Joe Reed said even before the election that majority-black districts need a black representative.

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