Yesterday I went to Sand Mountain Family Practice Center for my annual labs.
It was an ordinary appointment, the kind that comes with age and routine. I checked in, sat down, waited to be called back, and expected the visit to be uneventful. But while I was sitting there, I noticed a flyer posted on the door leading back to the lab area. It was promoting a Steve Marshall rally.
That disturbed me immediately.
Part of what bothered me was simple: I do not think partisan campaign material belongs in a medical setting. A health clinic is not a rally. It is not a church lobby. It is not a campaign office. It is a place where people come as patients — aging, uncertain, worried, exposed, waiting on answers. A medical office should lean toward care, neutrality, and dignity. It should not quietly signal that one political tribe, one moral brand, or one candidate belongs there more naturally than anyone else.
But what unsettled me even more was this: of all people, Steve Marshall.
Because once I saw his name on that flyer, the question became bigger than whether politics belonged on a clinic door. The deeper question was this: what exactly was being normalized there?
Steve Marshall wants to be seen as a man of faith, grit, and Alabama virtue. His Senate campaign literally uses the slogan “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.” When he launched his run for the Senate seat being vacated by Tommy Tuberville, the rollout leaned heavily on Donald Trump’s praise and presented Marshall as the kind of senator “our president can count on.” (AP News)
That language is not accidental. In Alabama, it is a formula. Wrap yourself in God-language. Speak in the idiom of home, tradition, strength, and righteousness. Present yourself not merely as a politician, but as a moral symbol. Make support for you feel like an extension of faithfulness itself.
But slogans do not tell the truth about a person. Choices do.
And Steve Marshall’s choices tell a revealing story.
He did not merely endorse Donald Trump from a safe distance. Marshall chose to travel to New York during Trump’s criminal hush-money trial and appear publicly in support of him. AP later described Marshall as one of several Republican elected officials who attended Trump’s 2024 hush-money trial in New York “to show support and speak on his behalf.” That is not passive alignment. That is active identification. Marshall wanted to be seen standing with Trump in that moment. (AP News)
And what kind of man was Marshall choosing to stand beside?
Donald Trump is a man who was found guilty on all 34 felony counts in the Manhattan hush-money case. Prosecutors said he falsified business records in order to conceal a payment meant to keep damaging information from voters before the 2016 election. He is also a man who was hit with a roughly $454 million civil fraud judgment after a New York court found that he fraudulently inflated his wealth for financial advantage. And he is a man who was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. Those are not talking points. Those are public facts. (AP News)
So when Steve Marshall chose to go to New York and stand with Trump, he was not standing with some persecuted hero of truth and decency. He was standing with a man publicly marked by fraud, criminal conviction, and abuse. That matters, because it tells me something about Marshall’s moral priorities. It tells me that whatever else he means by “values,” they do not begin with honesty, dignity, or respect for human beings.
And the Trump loyalty is only one piece of the pattern.
After the 2020 election, Alabama joined the Texas lawsuit that sought to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Steve Marshall signed Alabama onto that effort. The lawsuit asked the U.S. Supreme Court to toss out certified election results in states Biden won. Whether you call that legal maneuvering, partisan desperation, or outright election subversion, the core fact remains: Marshall aligned himself with an effort to discard lawful votes after his side lost. (Alabama Political Reporter)
That is not a small detail. It is one of the clearest windows into who he is.
A man who truly cared about democratic integrity would not lend his office to a scheme like that. A man who respected voters would not support an attempt to nullify certified results in other states. A man who believed truth mattered more than party would not help feed the fantasy that a lost election could simply be overturned by legal aggression. Marshall did.
Then there is the abortion-travel issue.
Marshall’s office took the position that Alabama could potentially use conspiracy law against people or groups who helped women travel out of state for legal abortions. That threat had real effects: abortion-assistance groups said they stopped helping patients because of the legal danger. A federal judge later ruled that Marshall could not prosecute people for such assistance, holding that such prosecutions would violate the First Amendment and the constitutional right to travel. In other words, Marshall was willing to push Alabama’s power across state lines and into private acts of help and support between human beings. (AP News)
That matters to me because it reveals a very specific moral posture.
It is one thing to oppose abortion. It is another thing entirely to threaten people who help women leave the state for lawful medical care elsewhere. That is not humility. That is not restraint. That is not reverence for human complexity. That is coercive power dressed up as principle.
Then there is the transgender issue.
Marshall has been a public defender of Alabama’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone treatments for transgender minors. Reuters reported that the 11th Circuit left that ban in place and that Marshall praised the decision. Whatever one thinks about the broader issue, the core point here is that Marshall again chose an aggressive use of state power in one of the most intimate and painful arenas imaginable: the medical decisions of families with vulnerable children. Opponents in the case argued that the law strips parents of the freedom to obtain medical care for their own children and places ideology over individualized treatment. (Reuters)
Again, the pattern is not hard to see. Marshall’s politics are repeatedly drawn toward control, punishment, and state intrusion — especially where fear, identity, and moral panic can be activated.
Then there is the death penalty.
Marshall’s office was central to Alabama becoming the first state in the nation to carry out an execution by nitrogen gas. Reuters reported that Alabama pioneered the method with the execution of Kenneth Smith and that Marshall later said Alabama would help other states adopt it. Reuters also reported witness descriptions of visible distress and criticism of the method as cruel and experimental. This was not some reluctant bureaucratic duty. Marshall publicly defended and promoted the method. (Reuters)
That too says something about who he is.
A man can speak endlessly about God, values, and righteousness. But when he repeatedly places himself on the side of harder punishment, more coercive power, more intrusion, more cruelty, and more loyalty to tribal leaders than to human dignity, then his actions begin to define him more clearly than any slogan ever could.
And that brings me to what I mean by real human values.
Real human values are not campaign branding.
Real human values are honesty when lying would be politically useful.
They are compassion when cruelty would energize your base.
They are humility instead of self-righteousness.
They are a respect for truth that survives even when your side loses an election.
They are a respect for bodily dignity, for human vulnerability, for the painful complexity of real lives.
They are decency toward women.
They are care for families in distress.
They are restraint in the use of power.
They are the refusal to make domination look holy.
By those standards, Steve Marshall’s public record tells me far more than his “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.” slogan ever could. (AP News)
And that is why the flyer on the clinic door disturbed me so much.
It was not just that politics had shown up where I did not think politics belonged. It was that this particular politics had shown up there — politics wrapped in God-language, politics built on Trump loyalty, politics willing to help overturn elections, politics willing to threaten helpers, politics willing to let the state reach deeper and deeper into private human lives, politics willing to pioneer a new method of execution and call it progress.
That is not what care looks like to me.
That is not what moral seriousness looks like to me.
And it is certainly not what real human values look like to me.
So yes, the flyer bothered me.
Not because I am too sensitive to handle disagreement.
Because I have lived long enough, watched long enough, and thought hard enough to recognize the old Southern trick when I see it: take power, wrap it in piety, call it values, and hope nobody looks too closely at what the man actually does.
Yesterday, sitting there in that clinic, I looked.
And I did not like what I saw.
Richard L. Fricks 