Subject to an automatic recount Nov. 29 because of the closeness, Alabamians voted not to repeal sections of a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1956 to mandate racially segregated schools...
Amendment 2 failed by about 2,500 votes. The typical Alabama voter marked a ballot for Bush and segregation.
You’re asking how this could happen. The Legislature referred the amendment unanimously. The governor endorsed it.
The answer is that professed Christians, those of supposedly superior moral values, beat Amendment 2.
The opposition was led by the state’s Christian Coalition, which assured everyone that it opposed segregation and a poll tax, of course. It said those provisions had long been moot anyway. It said it would work with the Legislature to repeal them.
But it was Amendment 2’s third repealing action — of the clause saying no child had a right to an education in Alabama — that these professed Christians rejected.
Roy Moore, the ousted Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who built a Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse, said that repealing the ban on a right to education would effectively establish such a right. That, he asserted, would be bad. He said trial lawyers would use the deletion to file suit to get taxes raised for public schools and maybe interfere with home schools and Christian schools.
Conservatives, especially conservative Christians, often like to compare themselves to civil rights crusaders; and take umbrage if one criticizes the likes of Clarence Thomas or Condi Rice implying somehow "it's because they're conservative African Americans." (See the comments here, for a good example.)
No "conservative Christians," it's because, uh, your fellow travelers are racist.
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