What a way for the latest in the long string of fools to occupy the governor's office in Montgomery to kick off his term in office.
Read the whole story at TPM Muckracker....
In case you missed it, the newly elected Guvnuh Robert Bentley (REPUBLICAN - ARE YOU SURPRISED??) went to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church - the church of Martin Luther King Jr during his time in Montgomery -- on Monday night to proclaim himself "color blind" but went on to say this:
"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 stopped just short of calling for non-Christians to accept Jesus Christ.
''Now I will have to say that, if we don't have the same daddy, we're not brothers and sisters," he said. "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."
Think about it. A hundred fifty years ago there were a string of bad governors who brought in the world's worst Reconstruction-era state constitution....which means that lumber companies and giant landholders keep the poor people of Alabama in a condition only slightly above serfdom by starving state government of money to improve their lot.
Now the new governor wants to alienate Jews and Muslims and agnostic and atheists - or at least to let them know, on his first day in office, that he only considers Christians his "brothers." This is a not particularly sophisticated form of dog-whistling. There has long been one "kind" of Alabamian who is considered all right: white Christian males. Everybody else is somewhere down the totem pole.