Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church seems a strange place for Alabama’s new governor to disown a class of people. Via LiA:
“There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit,” Bentley said. ”But if you have been adopted in God’s family like I have, and like you have if you’re a Christian and if you’re saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother and sister.”
Bentley added, ”Now I will have to say that, if we don’t have the same daddy, we’re not brothers and sisters. So anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.” (Emphasis mine)
Original here. Of course, that endorsement came in a church; Bentley took pains to say he was everyone’s governor. The nontroversy distracts from something much more ominous. Bentley, who quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in his inauguration speech, called on everyone in Alabama government to “create private sector jobs:”
We are going to have to be creative. Agencies that are not typically focused on job creation will certainly have to be now. Whether it is the Department of Transportation installing a turn lane so a Dollar General store can open on time or the Conservation Department helping to create and build a state-of-the-art convention center at Gulf Shores, our state’s mission from today forward is creating jobs for Alabamians. (Emphasis mine)
Remember the heady days of deregulation fever? Remember chainsaws at red tape-cutting photo ops? Remember when hydraulic fracking was exempted from all regulation? Remember when hundreds of mountaintop removal permits were issued in the dead of night? Good times, and now they’re coming to Alabama. Somehow, it will fail to turn us into an economic dynamo. What was that about the definition of insanity?
