This is an opinion column.

As my wife reminds me daily, our son is listening to everything we say. It doesn't matter he isn't yet three years old. His mind is a better recording device than whatever the NSA might have embedded in our smart speaker. He eats at our table. He plays on our floor. He might look a little bit like me and a little bit more like her, but he's a sleeper spy for his generation, diligently documenting our conversations when we think he's entranced by Sesame Street.

I know this to be true because, when I was his age, I spied on my family, too. At Thanksgivings, and weddings, and funerals -- whenever and wherever adults had adult conversations, I listened and tried to make sense of the things they said.

"You know, if Wallace hadn't been shot, he might have won."

In my mind's filing cabinet, I kept this one in a special folder. I didn't know at first what it meant, but I knew it was significant because I heard it so many times.

Gradually, I filled in enough blanks to understand that nothing about this President Wallace alternate timeline would have been good. It was a reminder that the American electorate had a dangerous impulsiveness -- what might be waiting for us if Uncle Sam stopped at the liquor store on the way home.

I comforted myself with wrong-headed assumptions -- that we had made progress and learned from our mistakes. America recognized the genocide of natives had been wrong, I thought. It understood the Jim Crow South was untenable and cruel, and that the Japanese internment had been unnecessary. Women's fortunes had improved and things were looking up for the LGBT community, too. America's crimes were in its past, and in its future was an opportunity to atone for those sins by living up to our nation's promise. We elected a black president, right?

I might never have been more wrong about anything in my life.

The Alabamafication of America is not a joke anymore. It is a reality. Wallace is dead, but his politics live.

Open your eyes. Wallace won.

Today, along our nation's border, agents of our government -- working in our name and paid with our money -- are tearing families apart, on orders from a man we elected, Donald Trump, and another man that guy appointed -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Alabama's own.

These families might have entered this country illegally, but they are still families, deserving of mercy and dignity. However, our president and our attorney general have made it clear that these tactics are meant to deter others. Perhaps it's bloodless cruelty, but it is cruelty, still. It is a form of torture. And thousands of those we're torturing are children, some no older than my son.

Meanwhile, Sessions has defended his actions with a lot of sloppy Bible talk.

"I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," Sessions said.

There's an argument to be made here -- and many have made it already -- that Sessions didn't read far enough in that chapter, to where Paul talks about love being the ultimate fulfillment of the law. But that misses the point. Sessions doesn't care about Jesus any more than he cares about immigrants. Forrest Gump might have known what love is, but not this Alabamian.

Instead, Sessions skipped over the red-letter stuff he didn't like and probably found his verse by typing hate speech into Google. The only moral instruction Sessions could ever find in the Bible's pages is how to crucify somebody. If you question his government, according to Sessions, you are questioning God.

Using religion to defend the indefensible is old politics in Alabama. The exact passage Sessions quoted was once used to convince slaves to accept their bondage and obey their masters.

Unfortunately, we in Alabama have seen how this ends, even if we haven't taken history's lessons to heart any more than the Bible's.

What's happening on our nation's border is HB56 all over again -- the toughest-in-the-nation anti-immigration law passed by the Alabama Legislature and signed by our governor in 2011.

In the last seven years, we've seen the moral authority of HB56's authors laid bare.

The bill's state Senate co-sponsor, Scott Beason, became a national embarrassment when, while an informant in a federal corruption investigation, he recorded himself calling black people "aborigines."

Micky Hammon, the House sponsor, recently pleaded guilty to mail fraud charges after he spent campaign funds on a get-rich-quick scheme that left him broke.

Governor Robert Bentley, who signed the bill into law, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and resigned from office after he betrayed his wife and used campaign funds to pay his love interest.

The politics of hate leads to sepsis of the soul.

But to see where the Alabamafication of America ends, there is no better example than Wallace himself. In Spike Lee's documentary, "Four Little Girls," Lee interviews Wallace in his last years. The scene is a Dorian Gray portrait of where the politics of division and hate leads those who dabble in it. Before his end, the former Alabama governor suffered through a living death.

In front of the camera, a barely intelligible Wallace mutters a weak defense about the good he did for African-Americans before he beckons his black nurse, Ed, to his side. Ed goes with him everywhere in the world, Wallace says.

"Here is one of my best friends right here," Wallace says, tugging Ed's hand. Ed, who doesn't want to be in the picture, awkwardly withdraws his hand and sidesteps out of the frame, leaving Wallace alone again and in silence.

Sometimes our rewards and punishments come to us before we're dead. If we let Wallace's politics win, something like that ugly, sad scene is waiting for us, too.

Because if God doesn't judge us, our children will.

And they are watching.

They are listening.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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