From The Washington Post
Opinions
Don’t let Roy Moore fool you: Alabama is not lost
"One of those prayers on Yom Kippur, this weekend, asks pardon for the sin of xenophobia, as well as for the mindfulness to do better in the new year.
I pray it for my fellow Alabamians, too.|"
That is the conclusion of a column in the Washington Post today by Roy Hoffman, a novelist and journalist...and author of the novel “Come Landfall” and essay collection “Alabama Afternoons.”
Read the entire column as you consider the likely election of Republican Roy Moore in Alabama on December 12th.
But the paper uses a photo of Moore from runoff election night here in Montgomery with a decorative table top centerpiece in the foreground. It shows a flag that some outsiders may think is a Confederate emblem. It is not. It is the state flag of Alabama. Does it have a confederate feel to it? Sure. And yes, Alabama used to fly the actual Confederate flag atop the Capitol Building, and around a confederate monument on the capitol grounds. But both were removed by governors. One a Democrat, Jim Folsom Junior, the other a Republican, Robert Bentley.
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| My photo from Tuesday night. The U.S. & The State Flag |
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| The Reuters/WaPo photo of the STATE Flag. |
By the way, the latest polling I've seen--in The Hill--- shows a rather slim 7% difference between Moore and the Democratic nominee, Doug Jones:
I am NOT suggesting that The Washington Post intentionally distorted the event to paint Alabama as Confederate central. But it is curious that their photo fails to show the U.S. flag that was in every centerpiece I saw, and instead focuses on a flag that I am sure will be seen as Confederate.
Moore, the controversial former judge who won Tuesday's GOP primary runoff, leads Moore by a margin of 50.2 percent to 44.5 percent in a new poll conducted by Opinion Savvy and commissioned by Decision Desk HQ. About 5 percent of polled voters said they were undecided.
Your neighbor, Georgia, revised its state flag at least twice in recent memory. Why not Alabama?
ReplyDeleteRight you are, Jay. But Alabama did change the state flag...once. Interesting history online including this note about the current flag,the one displayed in the Washington Post article, which was adopted about the same time two other former Confederate states did the same:
ReplyDelete"The flag changes in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida coincided with the passage of formal Jim Crow segregation laws throughout the South. Four years before Mississippi incorporated a Confederate battle flag into its state flag, its constitutional convention passed pioneering provisions to 'reform' politics by effectively disenfranchising most African Americans.[11]"
Here's the full history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Alabama