What Alabama’s Politics Could Teach the Rest of the Country

[ 11 ] January 28, 2013 AD |

When we first announced to friends and family our decision to move from Las Vegas to rural Alabama, you would have thought we said we were all growing bushy beards to live as hermits in a cave, way over in Mars, with Forrest Gump as our cult leader.  But time has proven that:  in the intensifying legal battle over the issues of life, marriage and religious freedom, the state of Alabama is on the right track.

First, in 2006, there came the approved amendment to the State Constitution, the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Act, that made it unconstitutional to recognize or perform same-sex marriage. No Sodom and Gomorra here.

Then, in 2012, there was the re-election of Judge Roy Moore as the Supreme Court Chief Justice. Moore being the famous judge who refused to remove the Ten Commandments from the courthouse more than a decade ago. He campaigned with the statement: “The true issue is whether we can acknowledge the sovereignty of almighty God over the affairs of our state and our law. That I will not back down from. I will always acknowledge the sovereignty of God and I think we must.” Justice Moore’s re-election signified a people’s desire to entrust their rights in the hands of a religious Christian.  No separation of Judeo-Christian morality from the state here, either.

During the same elections, the state of Alabama approved another amendment to its State Constitution that no employer shall be mandated to participate in the Federal Health Program (which of course included funding for abortion, contraception and sterilization.) The message was: no federal overreaching interference welcome here.

This January saw the jubilant news that the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that the definition of ‘child’ includes the unborn.  The Supreme Court stated that: “The decision of this Court today is in keeping with the widespread legal recognition that unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.” Furthermore, it affirmed that: “the decision in the present cases is consistent with the Declaration of Rights in the Alabama Constitution, which states that ‘all men are equally free and independent; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

As for euthanasia, the common law provisions still stand:  it is considered a Class A felony murder for a person to cause the death of another person with intent to cause the death of such a person.  Furthermore, physician assisted suicide is not condoned or authorized.  In short, we don’t want to kill y’all over here.

Way to go, Alabama!  If only you were a political trendsetter for the rest of the country.

I’m well aware that it is the same state the threatens immigration practice, cracked-down on the rights and status of my fellow immigrants and authorized it’s police to ask for my papers if they catch me violating driving laws just because I have brown skin and black hair.   As I am very much cognizant of the Catholic Church’s stand on immigration to oppose enforcement-only policies and support comprehensive immigration reform, citing under the Catechism 2241 that the more prosperous nations to the extent they are able, are obliged to welcome the foreigner in search of security and livelihood which is not available in his country of origin.

Before the ethnic minority population denounces me a persona non grata, put down those pitchforks and let me explain why I cheer on this conservatively religious southern state.  It is not just the numbers game that Alabama’s voters got 4 out of 5 out of the Church’s teachings correct.  Nor does it have anything to do with the fact that the University of Alabama’s Catholic football coach Nick Saban trumped Notre Dame at college football.  It is simply that, in the hierarchy of rights, Alabama’s voters and leaders have chosen the primary, non-negotiable issue of life over privacy, over health, over women’s rights, over livelihood, over the culture of death.

Alabama is trying to build the kind of world I want my children to be part of:  where life is the first inalienable, God-given right from conception to natural death; marriage is a sacrament and the basic foundation of a family and society; religious freedom is practiced by the Church; God’s laws are supreme and justice is grounded on truth and morality.

Alabama isn’t perfect (nowhere in the world is), but this is a place I can envision my children’s faith flourishing so that they can be prepared for their final home in eternity. To that end, even my own temporal self-interest, convenience, and strong opinion on immigration must be sacrificed for the good of their souls.

I continue to work with my parish for justice for individual immigrants and pray for just immigration laws, but in the long run, I choose life. More specifically, I choose the lives, faith and future of my children, both born and yet to be born.

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Category: Bioethics, Politics

About the Author ()

Anabelle Hazard, Esq. is a practicing Catholic, non-practicing attorney, happy homeschooler, penniless novelist and long winded blogger at Written By the Finger of God
  • http://www.healingandempowerment.blogspot.com Phil Dzialo

    A state in the U.S. which thumbs its nose at the constitutional separation of church and state and legalizes discrimination against gays should secede from the rest of the country. We are not a Christian country.

    “As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” Treaty of Tripoli,adopted by unanimous vote of US Senate in 1791 and signed by President John Adams
    Thank God, I live in Massachusetts…it respects the constitution!

    • Douglas Kraeger

      The united States today is a post christian nation. We were founded on Christian principles by Christians. After the passage of the Bill of Rights, including the prohibition “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” The members of Congress continued to open each session with a prayer. The Supreme Court in 1962, Engels v. Vitali, acknowledged this fact and did not ask and then answer the simple question, ” If the Founders who wrote and passed the First Amenment to the U. S. Constitution believed they still had a right to open each session of Congress after the ratification of the First Amendment, with an appropriate prayer, does this not prove that they believed all elements of Government had this right also and therefore we have no authority to rule otherwise?

      When someone puts the Supreme Court in it’s place, then we will be on the road to a christian nation again

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  • Douglas Kraeger

    Alabama sounds to good to be true. I wonder if you might perhaps be interested in the enclosed idea as to when the legal battlte over the Right to life will finally cut to the bottom line and reveal that the founders never entnded a supreme Court decision to be binding on anyone if the court decision implicitly or explicitly repudiated the Constitution of the United States.

    The Right to Life legal battle will be won if someone can publicly call a Judge to address three simple questions:

    1. Is the inalienable “right to Life”, of the declaration of Independence, that all men are endowed with by their Creator still part of the organic Law of the united States?

    2. Is this “Right to Life” an inalienable right of all men, all women, all children that they each have by right of their nature as human beings, or is it something that some men, women and children have but others do not because they are human beings but they fail to meet some other test?

    3. If each baby born has it by right of it’s nature as a human being one second after birth and no one claims that child’s nature changed by being born, will this court declare that that child had, and therefore every child has, that same inalienable right to Life by their nature before birth?

    The legal justification of the pursuit of this arguement goes back to one sentence in Roe v. Wade that was also in Doe v. bolton the year before,”This does not fully answer certain questions of amicae, (but, and) we will move on to other considerations” which has been let lie by so called “pro-life lawyers”

    Any sherrif bound to uphold the Constitution of these United States as the supreme law of the land could close down abortion mills and declare that no court has the authority under the Constitution to rule implicitly or explicitely that some men, women or children do not have the Inalienable Right to life by their nature and therefore are not to be protected by the law and can be killed.

    We all know that if some men, women or children are not protected by law because they do not have an inalienable right to life for some reason, then we do not really have a truely inalienable right to life, all we have is a special standing in the eyes of the law that some other human beings do not have because they do not meet the “qualifications” that we happen to meet. That contradicts the Organic Law of the United States that “All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights”. But the courts have not been made to publicly address this legal point.

    The founders intended the Constitution to be the Supreme Law of the Land and anything contrary to it to be unconstitutional and null and void with no obligation for anyone to follow such unconstitutional entity, whether it is a “law” passed by a legislature, an executive action of a president, or a court decision.

  • Douglas Kraeger

    Or maybe you know someone who would be interested in an approach to put prayer back in schools:

    The united States today is a post christian nation. We were founded on Christian principles by Christians. After the passage of the Bill of Rights, including the prohibition “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” The members of Congress continued to open each session with a prayer. The Supreme Court in 1962, Engels v. Vitali, acknowledged this fact and did not ask and then answer the simple question, ” If the Founders who wrote and passed the First Amenment to the U. S. Constitution believed they still had a right to open each session of Congress after the ratification of the First Amendment, with an appropriate prayer, does this not prove that they believed all elements of Government had this right also and therefore we have no authority to rule otherwise?
    No Court can deny that the founders believed they still had a right to open each session of Congress with an official prayer after the passage of the first amendment. But so far no lawyers can be found that will raise that issue. Maybe in Alabama?

  • http://www.healingandempowerment.blogspot.com Phil Dzialo

    ‘Such a view of American history (we are a Christian or post Christian nation)is completely contrary to known facts. The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible.” Read Jefferson and how he created his own version of the Bible…Thomas Paine, George Washington, Franklin, Munroe, Allen, Madison were DEISTS, not Christians. Please study your history!

  • http://www.acceptingabundance.com Stacy Trasancos

    “America wasn’t founded as a Christian nation and many of our beloved Forefathers sadly were not, yet America was largely comprised of Believers. Liberty allows us to worship freely or not at all per conscience. America was never meant to be theocratic or homogenous religiously, but Christianity has always been indelible to our social fabric.”

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/billflax/2012/09/25/was-america-founded-as-a-christian-nation/

  • http://www.bemadeclean.com Patricia Rose

    I think I may head there myself!

  • http://www.healingandempowerment.blogspot.com Phil Dzialo
  • http://www.fumblingtowardgrace.com Sarah Babbs

    You had me till Notre Dame. Too soon. I’m tried and true Indiana, and we have some great politics here too. ;)

  • Amy

    You should join the Constitution Party of AL. Find them on Facebook.

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