(Video above: Alabama State Rep. Patricia Todd (D-Birmingham) appears on MSNBC)
Alabama’s first and only openly gay legislator was a guest on “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC Tuesday evening after she went viral online with threats that she would expose her colleagues’ extramarital affairs.
“I will not stand by and allow legislators to talk about ‘family values’ when they have affairs, and I know of many who are and have,” Rep. Patricia Todd (D-Birmingham) wrote on her Facebook. “I will call our elected officials who want to hide in the closet OUT.”
Todd’s outburst came after she heard several Republican elected officials using “family values” as their reason for opposing a federal judge’s ruling that overturned Alabama’s constitutional ban on gay marriage.
Hayes asked her if she actually planned to make good on her threat.
“Obviously I don’t have proof because I wasn’t a person involved in the affairs, but the rumor mill is pretty strong in Montgomery,” she said. “My purpose was to say, ‘be careful when you cast that stone of family values. You need to look at your own family values first before you attack ours.’”
Hayes noted that although the current ruling in Alabama is on hold, the U.S. Supreme Court is planning to weigh in on the issue later this year. He asked Todd what she thought Alabamians’ reaction would be to same-sex marriage being legalized in the state by order of the nation’s high court.
“We don’t have a really good history when it comes to the federal courts telling us what to do,” she replied. “I like to say that Missouri is the ‘Show Me State’ and Alabama is the ‘Make Me State.’ They’ll have to get over it. In the mean time we’re hearing a lot of rhetoric from conservative Republicans, and I just want to remind them that they don’t have the corner on family values, that there are thousands of gay couples across the state — many of them raising children — who have much stronger family values than they do… If you want to talk to me about the merits of the issue, that’s fine. But I’m not going to let you get away with a five-second soundbite where you condemn me and my community.”
Hayes then turned his attention to Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who suggested in a letter to Gov. Robert Bentley that he would defy the federal court’s order because it does not have the authority to override the state’s constitution. The liberal MSNBC host asked Todd what percentage of Alabamians she believes Moore speaks for.
“I’d say about 10 percent,” she said, although 81 percent of the state’s voters passed the Sanctity of Marriage amendment in 2006. “The only way he got elected was, in Alabama you could go into the voting booth and vote straight party. So many people just went in and pull that ‘R’ lever and got elected. I talked to many Republicans who did not vote for him. But he got elected due to that fact.”
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— Cliff Sims (@Cliff_Sims) December 3, 2014
