In my last post, I wrote about the flyer I saw on the door at Sand Mountain Family Practice Center — a flyer promoting a Steve Marshall rally.
What bothered me first was the setting. A medical clinic should not feel like a campaign office. A patient sitting there for lab work, test results, or a diagnosis should not have to wonder whether the people responsible for his care are also quietly signaling political loyalty. A clinic should be a place of care, not tribal branding.
But as I wrote then, the deeper problem was not just that politics had appeared in a medical space. The deeper problem was which politics had appeared there — and which man was being normalized.
Now, only days later, Steve Marshall has revealed himself again.
This time, not through a flyer.
Through a map.
Through voting power.
Through his celebration of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakens one of the last meaningful protections left in the Voting Rights Act.
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, a case involving congressional redistricting and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision sharply changes how Section 2 can be used in racial vote-dilution cases. The Court held that states cannot be forced to draw districts based on race and that plaintiffs challenging a map must now do much more to prove intentional racial discrimination rather than partisan mapmaking. The practical effect is obvious: in states where race and party overlap heavily, a state can say, “We were not diluting Black voting power because of race. We were just pursuing partisan advantage.” (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)
That distinction may sound lawyerly.
It may sound neutral.
It may sound clean.
But in Alabama, it is anything but clean.
Because Alabama’s history is not neutral. The South’s history is not neutral. Voting rights are not an abstract academic exercise here. They were fought for, bled for, marched for, beaten for, and in some cases died for. The Voting Rights Act was not born out of paranoia. It was born out of real, deliberate, sustained racial exclusion.
So when the Supreme Court makes it harder to challenge maps that weaken Black political power, and when Steve Marshall rushes to celebrate that decision, we should not pretend we are watching ordinary legal disagreement.
We are watching values reveal themselves.
Marshall did not respond with caution. He did not say, “This is a serious decision, and we must be careful to ensure that every Alabamian’s voting power is protected.” He did not speak about Black citizens, minority representation, democratic inclusion, or the moral weight of Alabama’s history.
He celebrated.
His office called the decision “momentous.” Marshall called it a “watershed moment.” He said the Court had “shut the door” on vote-dilution claims that use racial data to disguise partisan disputes. He also said the South has made “extraordinary progress” and that laws “designed for a different era” do not reflect present reality. (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)
There it is.
That is the old Southern move in modern legal language.
Declare the past sufficiently healed. Declare the present essentially fair. Declare race-conscious protection to be the real problem. Then call the dismantling of protection “progress.”
The very next day, Marshall filed emergency motions asking the Supreme Court to lift injunctions that have blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map. In other words, he did not merely applaud the Louisiana decision from the sidelines. He immediately tried to use it to revive Alabama’s preferred map — the one blocked after courts found Alabama had failed to comply with the Voting Rights Act. (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)
That matters.
Because this is not theoretical.
This is not Steve Marshall writing a law review article.
This is Steve Marshall using the power of Alabama’s Attorney General’s office to reduce the force of voting-rights protections in this state.
And now he wants to be a United States Senator.
That should alarm anyone who cares about democracy, equality, racial justice, historical honesty, and basic human decency.
Marshall wants Alabama voters to see him through the language of faith, strength, and tradition. As I noted in the earlier post, his Senate campaign branding leans into the slogan “God. Grit. Alabama Strong.”
But slogans are not character.
A man’s values are revealed by what he celebrates.
Steve Marshall celebrates power when it is used against the vulnerable.
He celebrated the weakening of voting-rights protections.
He defended Alabama’s aggressive posture in redistricting.
He has aligned himself with Donald Trump.
He supported legal efforts after the 2020 election that sought to discard certified election results in states Trump lost.
He has threatened legal theories against those helping women travel out of state for lawful abortion care.
He has defended harsh state intrusion into the medical decisions of families with transgender children.
He has promoted Alabama’s role in pioneering nitrogen-gas execution.
Again and again, the pattern is the same.
Control.
Punishment.
Domination.
Tribal loyalty.
State power turned against people with less power.
That is what is obvious about what Steve Marshall stands for.
He stands for power wrapped in piety.
He stands for the state’s right to dominate, so long as the domination is framed as law, order, faith, tradition, or constitutional principle.
He stands for “freedom” when powerful people want fewer restraints.
He stands for “states’ rights” when Alabama wants to escape federal civil-rights oversight.
He stands for “colorblindness” when Black voters seek protection from dilution.
He stands for “life” when controlling women.
He stands for “family” when overriding vulnerable families.
He stands for “law and order” when expanding punishment.
He stands for “values” when the actual value being protected is hierarchy.
This is not a man fit to represent Alabama in the United States Senate.
Not because he is conservative.
Not because he is Republican.
Not because he uses religious language.
He is unfit because his public record shows a repeated willingness to use government power without adequate humility, compassion, historical honesty, or concern for the human beings most affected.
A person deeply interested in all humanity stands somewhere else entirely.
A person deeply interested in all humanity begins with the vulnerable, not the powerful.
Such a person asks: Who will be harmed by this decision?
Who will lose representation?
Who will be silenced?
Who will be made more afraid?
Who will have less access to care?
Who will be treated as a problem to manage instead of a person to understand?
Who will be crushed under the machinery of the state while politicians congratulate themselves for defending “values”?
A person deeply interested in all humanity does not look at the Voting Rights Act and see an outdated inconvenience.
He sees a hard-won protection born from suffering.
He sees Black Alabamians who were denied the vote for generations.
He sees literacy tests, poll taxes, intimidation, violence, courthouse doors, sheriff’s clubs, Sunday sermons, white citizens’ councils, respectable men in suits, and the long, bitter machinery of exclusion.
He sees Selma.
He sees John Lewis.
He sees the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
He sees blood on asphalt.
He sees why federal protection became necessary in the first place.
And because he sees that, he does not celebrate when protection is weakened.
He grieves.
He studies.
He asks what justice requires now.
That is the difference.
Steve Marshall looks at this decision and sees a victory for Alabama’s power.
A person concerned with all humanity looks at the same decision and asks what it means for Black citizens whose voting strength can now be diluted under the convenient label of partisan politics.
Steve Marshall sees the Court shutting the door on certain vote-dilution claims.
A person concerned with all humanity asks why that door existed in the first place — and who will be left outside now that it is closing.
Steve Marshall says the South has made extraordinary progress.
A person concerned with all humanity says progress is not proven by declaring racism over. Progress is proven by protecting people who have historically been excluded, even when protection complicates the ambitions of those in power.
And that is why this matters so deeply.
Alabama does not need another senator who performs righteousness while defending hierarchy.
Alabama does not need another politician who wraps aggression in God-language.
Alabama does not need another man who treats cruelty as courage, coercion as conviction, and exclusion as constitutional purity.
Alabama needs leaders with moral imagination.
Leaders who understand that democracy is not merely majority rule.
Leaders who understand that “the will of the people” cannot mean only the will of those already holding power.
Leaders who understand that voting rights are not favors granted by the state but protections against the state.
Leaders who can look at Alabama’s past without flinching — and then refuse to repeat it in cleaner language.
That is not Steve Marshall.
His reaction to Louisiana v. Callais makes that clear.
He did not merely accept a Supreme Court ruling. He celebrated the weakening of protection. Then he moved immediately to apply it in Alabama. That is not incidental. It is revealing.
And it takes me back to that clinic door.
The flyer bothered me then because it signaled that Steve Marshall’s politics had been given a place of casual respectability in a setting devoted to human care.
This Supreme Court reaction bothers me even more because it shows exactly why that casual respectability is dangerous.
A flyer can make a man look normal.
A slogan can make him sound virtuous.
A rally can make him appear strong.
But a voting-rights decision shows what he does when history, power, race, and democracy are on the table.
Steve Marshall chose the side of power.
He chose the side of less protection.
He chose the side of making it harder for minority voters to challenge maps that weaken their political voice.
He chose the side that Alabama has chosen too many times before.
That is what the flyer revealed.
That is what the map confirms.
And that is why Steve Marshall is not merely the wrong man for the United States Senate.
He is a warning.
A person can vote for Steve Marshall without knowing all of this. Many people vote from habit, family tradition, party loyalty, church culture, fear of the other side, or a few familiar phrases about faith and Alabama values. I understand that. But a person who does know — who knows about the Trump loyalty, the election-overturning effort, the abortion-travel threats, the transgender medical-care battles, the nitrogen-gas execution, and now the celebration of weakened voting-rights protections — is making a different kind of choice. That vote is no longer merely Republican. It is no longer merely conservative. It becomes a decision to accept these things as tolerable — or perhaps even desirable — in exchange for political power. And that is where moral responsibility begins.
Richard L. Fricks 