Robert Simpson: South still prominent in states of despair

Sometimes being a Southerner feels like being married to a beautiful, seductive woman from whom you could never bear to part. But she drives you crazy by continuing to harbor attachments to past lovers, all of whom have turned out to be disasters. She keeps being seen in public with various ones of them, and it breaks your heart. You don’t want to believe that she could still be so involved with intolerance, racism, and resentment, and you know the rest of the world condemns her because of it. And you also hate that your intimate connection to her means you’ll be tarred with the same stick.

Recent efforts to legislate protection for bigotry are not restricted just to Southern states. But, let’s face it — our official bigotry efforts probably attract more attention because we have more experience than most at officially condoned oppression of minorities and at working our way around legal rulings and the religious teachings we claim to follow. So it stands to reason we’d be good at it. What doesn’t stand to reason is the fact that we have come so far into the light and yet insist on swerving back into the darkness.

Some Southern states periodically do something outrageous that draws national attention, while others do strange things so routinely that the world gradually loses interest. For example, I can’t explain Alabama. A beautiful state, it has many things to recommend it, but its state government is not usually one of those things. I don’t live or vote there, so I’m reluctant to get enmeshed in the intricacies of what appear to be, year in and year out, a sort of loony-tunes governor and legislature that are immune both to improvement and to embarrassment. However, it requires no expertise for me to see that Alabama’s citizens, particularly the middle and lower classes, deserve a lot better than they are getting.

While Alabama just leaves me sad, North Carolina leaves me angry and ashamed. Angry that so many steps in the right direction could be so stupidly canceled, and ashamed to say that this, the “Tarheels,” “the Old North State,” “the land of the longleaf pine” — this is my native state. Long considered moderate, at least for a Southern state, North Carolina has surrendered its government to a governor and a group of politicians determined to wrench it back into the dark ages.

Some time back, the state became a gift for late night comedians when it passed a law banning the use of climate change data in the planning and development of coastal areas. Sea level rising? That’s bad for economic development and we don’t believe in it anyway, so we’ll just pass a law saying it must be ignored.

But worse was yet to come. Former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory became NC governor three years ago, and he and his henchmen set about reconstructing the state in their own image. They are steadily moving it, long a champion of education, away from the pursuit of responsible schooling of its children into an apparent second-rate effort, just getting by. Education budgets are hurting, and teachers’ pay has stagnated to the point that highly qualified teachers are retiring or leaving the state for better opportunities elsewhere.

Now the state government has adopted a new law designed to protect everyone from the threat of widespread invasion of restrooms by transgender folks who presumably have gone through the enormous process of gender change just so they, if former males, can now lurk in girls’ and women’s bathrooms. This assumes that, if you are transgender, you must automatically be a pervert. The law nullified a Charlotte ordinance guaranteeing equal treatment to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders. It prevented, in advance, any municipality from passing their own, possibly more generous, antidiscrimination rules. Thousands of my fellow North Carolinians, I’m sad to say, are cheering wildly.

Meanwhile, Governor Deal in my adopted state of Georgia took the eminently sensible step of vetoing a preposterous law designed to guarantee religious freedom to preachers who already have it, while simultaneously guaranteeing others the right to bigotry in the name of God.

I guess I’ve achieved a weird kind of balance in my life. I’m embarrassed by Governor McCrory, but I’m quite proud of Governor Deal.

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 2:14 PM with the headline "Robert Simpson: South still prominent in states of despair."