This is an opinion column.

The Alabama Legislature looked like it might begin its 2020 session with something serious, like prison conditions or the other favorite perennial issue, a lottery.

And then, we got a resolution about porn.

No sooner had the Alabama Senate gaveled in than had Sen. Dan Roberts, R-Mountain Brook, introduced the resolution recognizing pornography to be a public health emergency.

The resolution passed on a voice vote and now goes to the Alabama House for consideration.

Let’s be clear about what a resolution is and isn’t. It’s not a bill. It doesn’t carry the risk of becoming a law the state might have to enforce. Most carry the same force of standing up in your chair and shouting something loud enough that the neighbors can hear you.

But that’s not to say they aren’t meaningful.

Take, for example, a joint resolution many of these same lawmakers passed five years ago. Introduced by state Sen. Jabo Waggoner, R-Vestavia Hills, but written by a polluter’s lobbyist.

That resolution urged the Environmental Protection Agency to remove north Birmingham neighborhoods, which were already designated a Superfund site, from its National Priorities List, and to butt out of Alabama’s business. That resolution applauded Attorney General Luther Strange and Governor Robert Bentley for fighting the EPA’s efforts there, and it blasted the EPA for its theories about air pollution.

Let’s be clear, that resolution was written by Joel Gilbert, then a Balch & Bingham lawyer representing a Drummond Co. coking plant potentially on the hook for cleaning up that pollution had the EPA moved forward. Gilbert has since been convicted of bribery related to this campaign against the EPA.

And there are toxins in the ground in north Birmingham. Since Alabama has refused to contribute 10 percent of the cleanup costs, the EPA never put the north Birmingham neighborhoods on its priorities list.

Pollution in the soil children play in, dirt some folks still garden in — that might sound like a public health emergency.

But not to the Alabama Senate. Instead, it’s porn.

Last week, in north Alabama, residents learned that 3M is under federal investigation. A grand jury has served subpoenas to the company related to toxins it has recently admitted dumping in the Tennessee River and toxins that have been found in groundwater beneath a middle school in Decatur.

But that’s not the public health emergency. Instead, it’s porn.

Fewer than half the counties in Alabama have a hospital where a woman can safely give birth. We rank sixth-worst in infant mortality (an improvement), third in low birth weight, and third for preterm births.

But that’s not the public health emergency. Instead, it’s porn.

Hookworm, which everybody thought was a thing of the past in the United States, has reemerged in Alabama’s Black Belt.

But that’s not the public health emergency. Instead, it’s porn.

Alabama ranks the second-worst state for strokes, fourth for heart disease, 11th for cancer and — Lord help us if we ever dallied with this one — second for firearm deaths.

But that’s not the public health emergency. Instead, it’s porn.

Finally, more than 300,000 working Alabamians can’t afford health insurance because this state still stubbornly refuses to expand Medicaid, and we’ve long ago quit counting how many billions of federal dollars we’ve already turned away — money we could use to support rural hospitals and shore up most the problems I’ve just mentioned.

But right after the Senate passed the silly porn resolution, state Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh told reporters that his party is “not in the mood” to talk about expanding Medicaid.

If only there were something to get them in the mood.

Instead, what we saw on our first legislative day, that wasn’t governing. It wasn’t even politics. It was self-gratification at the public’s expense.

It’s political porn.

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

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb.

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