"The South Always Resists"

(click on image to enlarge)

(Stuart Carlson, via gocomics.com)

Leonard Pitts, on the "tradition" of Alabama Republican Supreme Court Chief "Justice" Roy "Less Is Less" Moore's anti-same sex marriage bigotry:

Last week, apparently channeling his inner George Wallace, Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. This was in defiance of a federal court that had struck down as unconstitutional Alabama’s ban on gay unions. [snip]

... History reminds us that whenever social change comes too fast for the South’s taste — which is to say, whenever social change comes — there seems to invariably arise some demagogue to decry the “tyranny” of having to obey the law and follow court orders. The South always resists. 

That’s what necessitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Freedom Rides of 1961. It’s why federal troops had to march into Little Rock in 1957. For that matter, it’s why they had to march into Richmond in 1865. The demagogues always use the same justification, always say that in denying it the right to discriminate as it sees fit, the federal government steps on the South’s “traditions.”

As they were in 1865, 1957, 1961 and 1965, today's Southern brain-fried bigots (joined by many millions of bigots everywhere else in the country) are on the wrong, losing side of history.  As Pitts notes, resistance to any change is, historically, a particularly Southern reaction.  But even more, it's just the natural reaction of small-minded, parochial, ignorant people regardless of where they live. That the chief "justice" of Alabama's highest court should be leading this resistance, given the State's reactionary history, is especially noteworthy and offensive, but not altogether surprising.

BONUS:  As might be expected, the boys in bedsheets have issued a "call to arms."  Isn't "tradition" wonderful?

BONUS II:  Looks like we got some bigots in the Mississippi judicial system, too.  Shocking.

BONUS III:  And the Mississippi legislature.