Scalawag, November 27, 2017
Last week, someone spray painted the word “rapist” across a big, wooden Roy Moore sign near my house in Birmingham. Someone else ripped Moore’s name from a voter registration flyer posted in the women’s restroom of the coffee shop near my son’s school. Meanwhile, yard signs for Democratic hopeful Doug Jones are popping up across the state—from Huntsville to Gadsden and Montgomery to Mobile.
On December 12, the nation will be watching to see if a homegrown backlash against the Republican candidate will translate into enough votes for a Democrat to win the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
Jones, whose campaign hasn’t emphasized faith, may be dependent on the very voters Moore believes are in his own pocket: Christians. While some evangelicals are standing with Moore, going so far as to equate the candidate’s taste for young girls to the carpenter Joseph wedding a teenage Mary, not every Christian in the state can wave away recent allegations with a holy wand.
KATHERINE WEBB-HEHN 