The World According to Oatney

Alabama is still sovereign

If we are to believe the mainstream press, more specifically the Washington Post, the people of the sovereign State of Alabama are a bunch of racist, redneck imbaciles who dropped out of high school and can't tie their own shoes. These people, we are being told, are not very intelligent folk, but they are smart enough to plot a conspiracy to re-segregate Alabama's schools.

Such a notion is patently rediculous, of course, but you'd think it was real considering how the mainstream press is covering Alabama's defeat of a state constitutional amendment on November 2nd that would have, among other things, eliminated language requiring "separate schools for white and colored children."

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is crying "conspiracy," and the Washington Post is declaring that the state's old racial wounds have been reopened. If that language were all that was at issue, I'd say that both the SCLC and the Post were absolutely right. As is usually the case in such matters, however, there was something else at issue that caused the defeat of the proposed amendment. The new amendment had language guaranteeing a "right" to public education. Many home-schoolers and other groups within Alabama, as well as others who educate their children outside the public school system were concerned that this new language might lead to greater state and federal control over their lives and the education of their children. (As has been seen in other states, this "right" often leads to government intrusion into personal lives on a grand scale.)

The Christian Coalition of Alabama, along with other allied groups say that they, too, believe the archaic race-language needs to be removed, they would merely like to see it done without adding new language that could create a whole series of legal messes. Perhaps the SCLC and their friends have learned a valuable lesson...You can remove what is bad without adding what may be worse. If a new amendment that simply removes the old language without adding any new legalisms comes to the Alabama ballot, it will overwhelmingly pass. If it does not come to a vote, then people will know that some liberals had more in mind than merely correcting an old injustice.

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 2:10 PM