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| Source:Real Time With Bill Maher- talking about Alabama Judge Roy Moore. |
"Bill reacts to the latest sexual assault allegations against Judge Roy Moore and others in his Real Time monologue."
From Real Time With Bill Maher
I'm not from Alabama and have never even actually spent a day in Alabama, but I get two things out of this story: One, that this behavior (assuming Roy Moore is guilty) is actually normal and if Roy Moore wasn't running for the U.S. Senate, maybe it wouldn't have become news. I mean, you had Republican leaders in that state saying what Moore is accused of are gifts from God and natural acts. I'm paraphrasing, but thats pretty close.
That if Moore wasn't the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate that this story would have never come out. The women wouldn't have come out because no one in Alabama including the media there, would have taken them seriously, let alone bothered to look into the allegations. Once Roy Moore not just declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and then won the GOP nomination, is when this story became a national story.
The Senate is part of Congress obviously and a Federal institution and not many people more powerful in the country than a U.S. Senator. And not many institutions covered more closely than Congress, because of how important it is. Which is why you had a Washington Post reporter covering an Alabama Senate race in Alabama and the women going to The Post to talk about their allegations. Now, if Roy Moore was running for State Senate in Alabama representing Gadsden, Alabama, then this story wouldn't be a big deal. Again, we wouldn't have heard from the women because they wouldn't have been taken seriously. And again, to go back to Alabama as a state: this behavior seems to at least be acceptable to the Christian-Right there. Which is more of a religious cult than anything else.
The other thing that I get from the Roy Moore story is that this is Alabama. Anyone left to wonder why Alabama is seen as a backwards, redneck, neanderthal, state that was in a statewide coma during most of the 20th Century and would only come out of their coma to prevent African-Americans from exercising their constitutional rights as American citizens. So of course a lot of Alabama is not aware of what has been going on in America in the last ten years or so, let alone the 20th Century, because they still believe America is in a pre-civil war area. And that women should be nothing more than servants to men. So why not teenage girls being servants to men and their sexual needs. At least this is the perception of Alabama and not just for Washington, or New York, or San Francisco, but Atlanta and a lot of the state of Georgia which is a neighbor of Alabama.
