A lot of people outside south central Alabama probably know Luverne as one of the small towns you pass through on the way to the beaches in the Florida panhandle on U.S. Highway 331.
For The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen, also of Roy Moore sexual allegations story fame, Luverne was one of those faraway places where parishioners of the Crenshaw County seat’s First Baptist Church live and support Donald Trump despite all the media efforts to show he’s led a life of sin.
McCrummen’s story published in Sunday’s edition of the Post takes another shot at solving the enigma of the connection Donald Trump has with his supporters.
Since 2015, the media have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to make sense of why these people, who they likely perceive to be intellectually inferior, could support a foul-mouthed womanizing vulgarian playboy billionaire from Queens.
“Don’t these people know what is good for them? They go to church, and their so-called holy texts tell them THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY. Trump committed adultery. Therefore he should be rendered unfit for office!”
And since they don’t immediately disavow Trump, the insults come their way.
“They’re hypocrites!” “They’re mind-numb zombies that had their souls stolen by Fox News!”
Where the media are wrong and perhaps intellectually lazy is by taking the liberty to operate on a lot of incorrect assumptions about Trump voters.
The media assume that when people vote for a president, they’re looking for a Christ-like spiritual leader. They’re not. They’re looking for someone to defend their right to practice their religion without interference from government.
The media assume that the cultural norms they accept should be accepted by all, or they’re just bigots. Gender-neutral schoolhouse bathrooms and abortion on demand might be considered social progress in some places, but not Luverne, Alabama.
Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 saying he would focus on making the economy better for all Americans. He has avoided putting hyper-focus left-wing hobbyhorses that favor 0.3 percent of the population.
That tack probably won him a few votes from the pews of the First Baptist Church of Luverne.
The media also operate on the assumption, at least for the purposes of McCrummen’s article, that the (D) and the (R) by a candidate’s name on the ballot are meaningless on Election Day. Last Tuesday, Martha Roby won Crenshaw County by a 70-30 percent margin over former Democrat Bobby Bright in Alabama’s second congressional district Republican runoff.
It doesn’t matter who the candidate is. If they run as a Democrat or have a past affiliation with the Democratic Party, they can’t win in some places in Alabama. McCrummen probably knows better, but why allow party affiliation to factor into a narrative about hypocrisy, sex, religion and Trump supporters?
Donald Trump, while not perfect, was a candidate that came out on their side of a lot of cultural issues. He supports the Second Amendment. He went out on a limb and advocated people stand for the National Anthem. Perhaps those are thought to be dog whistles in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., but not in Alabama.
Trump’s churchgoing supporters weren’t looking for someone that adhered to The Washington Post’s shallow understanding of the Bible and Christianity that seemed to have completely missed the part about the Grace of God as laid out in the New Testament.
Without saying it, the readers’ takeaway was supposed to be: “But, it says ‘THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.’ Why are these rubes with their Bibles still voting for this guy?!?!?”
It is a bad idea to treat any place in America as some alien culture worthy of a 5,000-word Washington Post story full of superfluous details about their way of life. But then again, when have our Fourth Estate been concerned about how they are viewed by the public?
It’s condescending. It’s demeaning. It’s par for the course when national media come to Alabama to validate a bias.
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and is the editor of Breitbart TV.
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