Why I’m afraid with Alabama

Coming out of Thanksgiving, new poll results show Judge Roy Moore (R) ahead of Doug Jones (D) in the Alabama gubernatorial race. Even after allegations from 9 women of sexual misconduct, Roy Moore is currently ahead 49 percent to 44 percent, as reported by Change Research. For all of Thanksgiving Break, I couldn’t get the same question out of my head, how anyone could support a candidate accused by so many women of sexual assault.

These polls and further interviews show two camps with regards to this issue in Moore’s supporters: those who believe him and those who don’t. Both trends have troubling ramifications for the state of politics in the United States because the reasoning on either side is not native to Moore’s case, or even for sexual assault. If this phenomenon taking place in Alabama spreads to other states, the tools which candidates use and the tools which constituents use to talk about and then act upon these sorts of issues will have to be reconstructed.

When asked about their disbelief in the accusations, several party officials and many constituents in Alabama have branded them as “fake news.” Claiming political bias in the media, constituents cite more and more distrust in the information they receive from the news, or from sexual assault victims themselves. This trend didn’t begin with Roy Moore. But the translation of  distrust in the stories of these women and the news to Republican voters’ mentalities is alarming, especially in a political environment in which Senator Al Franken (D), who is accused of inappropriate conduct by four different women, is facing multiple calls for resignation by his own party.

Rather than addressing the accusations, some party officials in Alabama take a seemingly hyperbolic partisan approach. The chair of the Bibb County Republican Party stated that regardless of how substantiated the claims of sexual misconduct are, he “just opposes Democrats.” This method of hyper-partisanship would have disastrous enough effects on the country, but when coupled with religious legitimization, allows for a completely different set of moral values. 

Moore’s history of tiptoeing the line between church and state only adds to his support from his constituents, famous for refusing to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from a government building. It’s paid off. The former head of two major Christian coalitions in the state told the Washington Examiner on that there is nothing wrong with a man in his early 30s dating a teenager, and suddenly Moore has a support group. While a sensationalist would brand this as an unravelling of the secular separation of church and state, voters place a fair amount of stock in their personal religious beliefs as a moral foundation in Alabama. But is this endemic to that state, or even the South as a whole?

I am not alone in trying to incorrectly categorize the current situation in Alabama as something that would occur “only in Alabama.” For years, I’ve chided friends from the south for the seemingly backwards ways of their state politics, but the ingredients that have driven the Alabama gubernatorial race don’t just exist in the south. Alabama is one of more than fifteen states whose constituency is more than 51 percent Christian, is joined by states like Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. The trust in the news itself has fallen to a record low, with only 32 percent of Americans expressing trust in the media.

Moore might very will win the election; it’s not the first time someone facing allegations of sexual assault has been elected, and it certainly won’t be the last, given the current environment that victims face in the country. While that trend is certainly concerning and must be assuaged, my worry lies with the manifestation of this particular issue in politics. A political future in which the facts constructing an issue become irrelevant to a constituency, and religion is used to legitimize a candidate beyond the moral values that Americans purportedly hold, is a future I don’t wish to subscribe to, but ultimately see unfolding.