Last year, I wrote an article titled, “Damn right, I come from Alabama” in response to the Montgomery brawl that captured the nation’s attention for weeks.
I made a bold remark that Alabama was finally on the right side of history in terms of how it is viewed by others outside the state, for once: footage of Black folk standing up for themselves in the face of blatant racism went viral. However, I must admit, after the article ran, I privately contemplated how many days, minutes, seconds would it take for Alabama to reassume its stupidity-throne with some backward, ignorant thing that would once again recrown it as the epitome of whistling Dixie.
It took approximately six months.
Alabama purports to be a fire-red Christian state with deep family values. And perhaps in their own eyes, no one is more Christian and has a more personal relationship with God than the good citizens of Dixie. In reality, it is a twisted version of rogue Christianity in which two-faced thought is at the epicenter of any form of truth.
To pull the covers off this Christian hypocrisy, follow me back to January 25, 2024, when Alabama made international news in how it killed a man on death row. The execution was a heinous, immoral and outright shocking display of vitriolic violence, incorporating a procedure that had never been used before. Of course, leave it for Alabama to be the worldwide leader in all things ignorant — or as they say down South, ignant. Allow me to give you the visual: a contraption resembling a diver’s helmet was placed on Kenneth Eugene Smith as he awaited death. One could surmise Mr. Smith looked like a deep sea diver or an astronaut, except his only exploration would be via a one-way ticket to the great beyond.
With the contraption pulled over his head, Mr. Smith was forced to inhale nitrogen hypoxia until, as eyewitnesses reported, his body parts twisted and squirmed and he no longer existed among the living. At that moment, I wonder if the jury who originally sentenced Mr. Smith to life without parole appreciated the judge overruling their original sentence and taking it upon himself to administer his version of vigilante justice by sentencing Mr. Smith to die.
To execute Mr. Smith in such an inhumane manner makes one wonder how we can call America a civilized society.
If that mode of execution isn’t enough to make a moral person cringe, how about 30 days after breaking the most scared covenant of Christianity by killing someone, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that frozen embryos can be considered "children" in a ruling on "wrongful death of a child" lawsuits filed by couples whose embryos, frozen as part of the in vitro fertilization process, had accidentally been destroyed. This caused IVF treatments to come to a halt in the state due to legal liability concerns.
Allow me to quote Chief Justice Tom Parker's reasoning behind this decision: “[H]uman life, cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself.”
This is what the new generation would call a WTF moment in history. Right after Alabama suffocates a human being to death, the state then spins its own narrative spin with yet another spin. How can the state kill a human being and yet say it is immoral to kill a human being? I would love to ask the powers that be within the state the following question: Are not all human beings molded in your God’s image? Or is this a selective God that will sanction murder in the same breath as condone it?
The IVF ruling was not even thinly veiled in its intention to cross boundaries between the separation of church and state. At the center of this blatant integration of confederate theology belies the real subtext: Alabama has a horrid history of control and hate, riddled with white men trying to tell women what to do with their bodies.
Recently I talked with my Advanced Poetry students about Alabama’s execution and IVF ruling. These young poets were eager to talk. While many students held varying views on the death penalty, they seemed united in the understanding that a woman’s body is hers as much as a man’s body is his. Many of the young women in my class were jaded after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but the Alabama court ruling made them mad as hell. They could not get past the disbelief of how someone wanted to control their body. When I asked students to explain a bit more in detail, they articulated, with clarity, that these measures were draconian and archaic, the polar opposite of what a civilized society should resemble. If I had to paraphrase the conversation, mostly led by the women, it would be this: “Alabama is playing the role of God.”
In other words, the two events, taken together — the methodology of execution and the ruling that jeopardizes in vitro fertilization as a method to start a family — were enough for them to agree this was indeed a WTF moment.
This is what the new generation would call a WTF moment in history.
And then the state spinned its narrative again.
Many conservative Christian women around the state apparently felt as my students did — that a ruling that would restrict a woman’s right to start a family as she is able was a bridge too far. But the same hypocritical fools who likely supported amending the state constitution in 2019 to “ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child,” which played a role in the IVF ruling, only care enough to address this madness with a temporary bandage at best. Thanks to their outrage, Gov. Kay Ivey might as well have been on ice skates in terms of how quickly she signed a new bill granting civil and criminal immunity to IVF practitioners into law. But while the new law supposedly shields doctors and providers from legal liability when working with frozen embryos, critics say it avoids addressing the real problem — the ruling that confers "personhood" onto embryos in the first place. I guess for the gain of political favor, God gonna let this one slide for the good Christian folks in Alabama?
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Regarding a woman’s right to make the choices that affect her body, I speak from experience: A woman I was in a relationship with got pregnant, and because neither of us was prepared to raise a child, she decided to get an abortion. Initially, I wanted to have the child and figure it out. She did not. When I listened to the pain and internal struggle she was going through, I began to understand. This was her decision, and I had to respect that. That changed me. I get it. I, as a man, have no right to tell a woman what to do with her body.
Lately, I've felt like I've traveled through a portal against my will to Earth 2, a parallel universe to Earth l. On Earth 2, society has been turned upside down, and the immoral is now the moral. Spirituality is placed on a pinwheel and spun counterclockwise, stopping at random to decide how to control the citizens. Seasons are unbalanced. Sometimes it forgets to snow in winter and sunny days are often shaped by gray clouds stuck in suspended animation. The birds are just as confused as the humans.
All Alabama has given us is more contradictions: What is life and what isn’t? Who gets to live, and who doesn’t?
Spin, spin, spin. Every legislator in the state of Alabama who placed this madness in motion should be dizzy from all the spinning. I don’t know how they’re still walking upright.
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