Alabama You’re On Your Own; Don’t Let The Door Hit You On Your Way Out
Maybe Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., had something when she talked about the red and blue states separating into two distinct nations. One good reason to do it might be represented by the actions of one congressman from Alabama and a state whose history is sprinkled with such infamous residents as a serial killer known as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow and Lady Blue Beard.
The war is raging in Ukraine, climate change is causing untold destruction, an ex-president may be indicted and a railroad calamity threatens the health of thousands. Meanwhile, Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., a member of the far right Freedom Caucus, is working feverishly to win passage of his bill to name the AR-15 as the “National Gun of America.”
Co-sponsors of the bill include that icon of wisdom, the gun toting, God-fearing, white loving, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Color., and the man who has never met an outlandish lie he didn’t like and even fibbed while in his mother’s womb, Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y.
Why memorialize the semi-automatic rifle, the go-to weapon for school shooters and other mass murderers? If anything, the National Gun should be the Brown Bess, a muzzleloading, smoothbore musket that helped the colonists win independence from England; or the Colt Frontier Six Shooter Revolver, AKA the “Peacemaker,” the gun that tamed the wild west; or even the H-bomb, at least the bomb ushered in the end of World War II.
But not the AR-15, the infamous rifle that has been dubbed “America’s Rifle” by the NRA and has blood dripping from its use in 11 mass shootings since 2012.
Insider magazine reported that there are around 20 million AR-15-style weapons “in circulation” throughout the U.S. Alabama ranks eighth in the nation for gun ownership, with about 55.5 percent of Alabamans owning firearms.
Alabama is known as Alabama the Beautiful, the Cotton Plantation State, the Cotton State, Heart of Dixie, Lizard State, Sweet Home Alabama and the Yellowhammer State (known to the rest of us as the yellow-shafted flicker). Moore is asking why not add the AR-15 to the list of state identifiers?
The AR-15 would be the first national gun but nine states have designated state firearms, including Alaska, Arizona, Utah, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas. None honors the AR-15, however.
Boebert has gained acclaim from her fellow fruit-pickers on the right wing and Santos has carefully crafted a reputation as a psychopathic liar. But what about the not so squeaky-clean Moore and the company he keeps?
Moore, 56, has been a congressman from Alabama’s second congressional district since Jan. 2, 2021. He was reelected in 2022. Moore had run for congress in 2018 and came in third in a field of three. He was previously a member of the Alabama House of Representatives from Nov. 3, 2010 through Nov. 7, 2018.
Moore grew up on a farm in Coffee County, Ala. and attended Enterprise State Community College and later, Auburn University, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in agricultural science in 1992. While attending Auburn, Moore was enlisted in the Alabama National Guard.
Moore has made his money in garbage, literally. In 1998, he founded Barry Moore Industries, a waste hauling company now known as Hopper-Moore Inc. The company supplies roll off containers and Port-a-Johns and offers demolition and excavation services.
In his first campaign for the Alabama House of Representatives in 2010, Moore defeated Democratic incumbent Terry Spicer. More than $150,000, the bulk of Moore’s campaign contributions, came from PACs controlled by Mike Hubbard.
Hubbard was a Republican member of the Alabama House of Representatives. He was House Minority Leader for six years and was twice chairman of the Alabama Republican Party. Hubbard also spent three years in prison for felony violations of state ethics laws.
Two months after Moore was elected to the State House, he and his wife, Heather, were awarded a contract with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, collecting a total of $64,612 in payments from from 2011 through 2013. The next year, in April 2014, Moore was arrested for felony perjury and lying to authorities during a grand jury investigation into Hubbard and political corruption. In late 2014, Moore was acquitted of all charges.
Moore was the second state legislator arrested in connection with the ongoing public corruption probe. On April 1, Republican Rep. Greg Wren of Montgomery agreed to resign and plead guilty to ethics violations.
Last October, Sherry McCormick, an aide to Moore, pleaded guilty to health care insurance fraud. McCormick was director of special constituent services and events for Moore. In 2017, before she worked for Moore, McCormick pleaded guilty to submitting almost a half million dollars in false insurance claims and served eight months in federal prison.
On Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the assault on the Capitol by trump supporters, Moore objected to the certification of the presidential election results in Congress. The next day, Moore was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results.
On Jan. 10, Moore tweeted that the election was stolen from trump while he also questioned the circumstances of the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot as she tried to break through a secure room in the Capitol, in the heat of the insurrection.
In February 2021, Moore voted against the American Rescue Plan, calling it a “blue state bailout.” The same month, he co-signed the “Right To Earn A Living Act,” which would make state and local governments that implement pandemic-related stay-at-home orders ineligible for funding through the Coronavirus Relief Fund.
In June 2021, Moore was one of 21 House Republicans who voted not to give the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Moore has sponsored other legislation that is equally corrosive to his wrongheaded plan to honor the AR-15. On Feb. 9, he sponsored a bill to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and to provide funding directly to states for elementary and secondary education. Moore co-sponsored a bill to prohibit the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from requiring SEC applicants to disclose information about greenhouse gas emissions.
He is a co-sponsor of a bill to repeal the National Firearms Act and another a bill to prohibit altering or destroying any features of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. He also signed a Republican congressional resolution that denounces socialism and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States.
In Alabama, the mosquitoes are so big and so numerous that they will eat you alive. But that’s better than being lynched, another despicable and relatively common past practice of Alabama, which is known by the state motto, “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” and has nicknames, the Yellowhammer State, the “Heart of Dixie” and the “Cotton State.”
The first racial lynching in Alabama came in 1877 and the last was in 1943. In between, 340 people were hung. That ranks below number one Mississippi and its 581 lynchings; followed by Georgia with 531 lynchings, Louisiana with 391 lynchings, and then Alabama.
Alabama also is in contention for the state with the most executions per 100,000 citizens. Through 2020, Alabama had executed 67 people, a rate of 1.37 per 100,000 population.
Oklahoma is at the top with 112 executions, a rate of 2.83 per 100,000 people; followed by Texas, with 570 executions or 1.97 per 100,000 population; Delaware had 16 executions, a rate of 1.64 per 100,000; and Missouri has executed 90 people, at a rate of 1.47 per 100,000; and then Alabama.
Alabama has a dreary history of making life difficult if not impossible for African Americans.
Among its infamous residents is Stephen Donald Black, the founder and webmaster of the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, Holocaust denial, homophobic, Islamophobic, and racist Stormfront Internet forum. He was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party in the 1970s. Black was convicted in 1981 of attempting an armed overthrow of the government in the island of Dominica in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.
Another Alabamian, Donald Broadnax, was convicted and sentenced to 99 years imprisonment for fatally shooting a friend in Birmingham, in 1977. Broadnax was released on work release in 1996, and proceeded to murder his wife and her grandson.
And there’s Nannie Doss who was responsible for the deaths of 11 people between the 1920s and 1954. Doss was also referred to as the Giggling Granny, the Lonely Hearts Killer, the Black Widow, and Lady Blue Beard. She ultimately confessed to killing four husbands, two children, two of her sisters, her mother, two grandsons, and a mother-in-law.
Alabama is decried for its stultifying and deadly Jim Crow laws, cruelly drawn after the Civil War to ensure that formerly enslaved people remained essentially enslaved.
In the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans fought to end disenfranchisement and segregation in the state through the civil rights movement, including legal challenges. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools had to be desegregated, but during the 1960s, under segregationist Gov. George Wallace, Alabama resisted compliance with federal demands for desegregation. The civil rights movement had notable events in Alabama, including the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956), Freedom Rides in 1961, and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. The movement contributed to Congressional passage and enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the U.S. Congress.
During the antebellum period, Alabama was a major producer of cotton, and widely used African American slave labor. In 1861, the state seceded from the union to join the confederacy. For a time, Birmingham was the capitol of the new confederate states. After the war, like other former slave states, Alabamian legislators employed Jim Crow laws which disenfranchised and discriminated against African Americans from the late 19th century through the 1960s.
During reconstruction, organized resistance groups tried to suppress the freedmen and Republicans, including the original Ku Klux Klan, the Pale Faces, Knights of the White Camellia, Red Shirts, and the White League.
The new 1901 Constitution of Alabama effectively disenfranchised nearly all African Americans and Native Americans, and tens of thousands of poor European Americans.
The state Legislature passed racial segregation laws related to public facilities into the 1950s: jails were segregated in 1911; hospitals in 1915; toilets, hotels, and restaurants in 1928; and bus stop waiting rooms in 1945.
So yes, Alabama, good riddance. And while you’re at it, take Alaska state Rep. David Eastman with you. The Republican, a member of the Oath Keepers militia group, was recently censured after asking facetiously if dead children are “actually a benefit to society.”
In a hearing on Monday, Eastman said that he claimed to have heard “on occasion” that when a child is killed by an abuser, “obviously it’s not good for the child, but it’s actually a benefit to society because there aren’t needs for government services and whatnot over the whole course of that child’s left.”
The hearing was presented by the Alaska Children’s Trust on preventing adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse, neglect, substance abuse, or domestic violence. A section of the hearing explained the cost of adverse childhood experiences and how to prevent them.