{"id":2962,"date":"2004-11-05T09:30:45","date_gmt":"2004-11-05T14:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2962.html"},"modified":"2004-11-05T09:30:45","modified_gmt":"2004-11-05T14:30:45","slug":"not-so-sweet-home-alabama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/not-so-sweet-home-alabama\/","title":{"rendered":"Not-so-sweet Home Alabama"},"content":{"rendered":"

My friend Eugene Oregon reminds us<\/a> that that voters in Alabama, perhaps the reddest of all red states, had a chance to remove disgusting and racist language from its state constitution this week — but chose not to<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An effort to rid Alabama’s Constitution of segregation-era language appears to be losing by a slim margin after critics raised concerns that it could lead to a court-ordered tax increase for public schools. <\/p>\n

With 99% of precincts reporting as the unofficial count neared completion today, Amendment Two was losing by about 3,400 votes out of 1.37million cast. <\/p>\n

There were nearly 689,000 votes against it, and 685,508 votes for it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alabama legally mandated segregated public schools long before the Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal.” Of course, after Brown, Alabama didn’t have a choice about the law, which the state could no longer enforce, but it remained on the books. Its presence was a moot point, but was an ugly reminder of the state’s racist policies. This was a chance to set the state constitution right, but groups like the Christian Coalition and lunatics like Roy Moore fought to defeat it. Unless absentee ballots and\/or a recount tip the scales, their support for Jim Crow laws have won.<\/p>\n

I suppose the saving grace here is that the narrowly defeated provision is being reworded<\/a> to alleviate the fears of the radical fringe.<\/p>\n

Still, for a state that couldn’t appear much worse, Alabama didn’t have a good week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Eugene Oregon reminds us that that voters in Alabama, perhaps the reddest of all red states, had a chance to remove disgusting and racist language from its state constitution this week — but chose not to. An effort to rid Alabama’s Constitution of segregation-era language appears to be losing by a slim margin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}