As with all things it's complicated. Suffice to say Alabama like all the states is a rather strange little country. The reasons one would embrace someone like the current judge, and would be senator Roy Moore is on the face of it a mysteriously complicated thing. However yes come down to it....it eats shit. However I'm going for an exploration of the how, and whys.
This always makes for a better story.
Items unique to Alabama come into play here. There will be dissertations, and assorted academic scribbling about this for years to come. As will this entire era of the rise of the extreme right to power. Many are saying it's just racism, and contempt for the personhoods of women, and children. Of course that. However with byzantine layers going back to the founding of the Alabama colony,...if not before.
The native elements to the culture of each state is overlooked, but are there.
The whole mess is at work. As it is in any human enterprise of nationhood. Make no mistake the states are separate nations. This is how we saw our selves from the beginning. The Civil War brought it into murderous focus. After which we agreed we were a nation of 'United' States. However the local sense of nationhood of each state is still very much here, and the traditions of that still at work. Ask anyone who has run for office in any of these 50 little or large countries. ...I have. It's there.
So the oddities of this or that state is very understandable. They're nations, and nations have unique identities. Why Texas for example not only keeps their Death Penalty, but likes it. Other states other evidences of values that they will 'never' let go. Add the sexual equations to it you get a whole state that votes for a man that celebrates statutory rape.
Sex, and or marriage with teen very young women was, and quietly still is a cultural given in parts of the south, and mid-west. See how so many evangelical congregations point to the teen Mary, and adult Joseph as justification of intergenerational relations.
Straight relations.
They'd still Burn Thomas Mann's "Death In Venice". As would hoards of revisionist straight gays.
The Dionysian tradition of the love of youths didn't make the trip across the Atlantic. The Roman attraction to young maids did.
Just a casual digging into the recorded histories of cultures tells one much. Explains why thus is so, and thus is not. Many feel their values are eternal, and given by a deity. It literally came tumbling out of the sky.
Whereas it was their ancestors. What those long ago people held as right or wrong. What was acceptable, and valuable or of no concern. I imagine this is why literacy in some regions is held in contempt.
This since it undermines Order. 'Any' established order.
Since merely reading will show the clay on which assorted histories are established. They burned people alive for reading the Bible in their own language for a reason.
Knowledge is power. Then, and even more so now.
Just a casual digging into the recorded histories of cultures tells one much. Explains why thus is so, and thus is not. Many feel their values are eternal, and given by a deity. It literally came tumbling out of the sky.
Whereas it was their ancestors. What those long ago people held as right or wrong. What was acceptable, and valuable or of no concern. I imagine this is why literacy in some regions is held in contempt.
This since it undermines Order. 'Any' established order.
Since merely reading will show the clay on which assorted histories are established. They burned people alive for reading the Bible in their own language for a reason.
Knowledge is power. Then, and even more so now.
Next question...
(...I only post this post here. Anywhere else a flame war would ensue. Emotions are running to hysterical, and not in a funny way. No one can be rational on this or the fall of the white men on TV.)
(...I only post this post here. Anywhere else a flame war would ensue. Emotions are running to hysterical, and not in a funny way. No one can be rational on this or the fall of the white men on TV.)
