The executive committees of both the Limestone and Morgan County, Alabama Republican parties voted last week to challenge Madison County Commission Chair Dale Strong’s right to appear on the ballot in the primary for the state’s 5th Congressional District congressional race over Strong greenlighting the removal of a Confederate soldier’s statue from the front of the Madison County Courthouse in October 2020, AL.com reports. The statue of the generic soldier, subject to constant vandalism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, was moved to a nearby cemetery.
“It was entirely about the monument,” Morgan County GOP Vice Chairman John Mays said last week. “The Legislature has made it a crime (to move such statues), he moved it, and he knew it was against the law,” Mays continued, without explaining why he thinks Strong hasn’t been arrested yet and trying to kick him off the ballot is the best he can do. “My understanding is to be taken off the ballot they’ve got to prove I’m not a Republican, and that will never happen,” said Strong, adding “We did not take our monument to a storage building. We took it directly to a location in an effort to preserve and protect it.” Nice how even the marginally less unreasonable guy, the one being harassed by hardcore MAGA extremists in Alabama is still pro-Confederate.