Recently, the state's Chief Justice Roy Moore has demonstrated once again that Alabama excels at sound bite bigotry, but is that keeping the rest of the country from having an honest conversation with itself?

50 years ago, George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jim Clark cemented Alabama's role as the face of racism and the cradle of the civil rights movement. Subsequently, Alabama has become shorthand for racist - and it seems inevitable that Roy Moore will become the once and future face of homophobia - but it is misleading for Americans and Alabamians alike to suggest that we are the sole perpetrators of such thought.

Unfortunately, Alabama's such an easy scapegoat for our country's darkest past that even Alabama-natives allow themselves to get caught up in the narrative.

A common refrain this week on social media was for progressive-Alabamians and progressive Alabama ex-pats to voice their concerns that "I thought we'd be last" or that "Alabama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century."

While I won't dispute that Alabama has a history of conservative thought and that anti-gay sentiment is higher here than in much of the country, this line of thinking is incredibly generous to the rest of the country.

Polling indicates that 55% of voters nationally support gay marriage. However, on a state by state basis, voters have been much less forgiving. In 2008, California residents voted to define marriage between one man and one woman, the very same year that President Obama was elected. It took a 2010 federal court decision, and three years of appeals, to reach the decision allowing loving, same-sex couples to legally wed in the Golden State.

Of the 36 states that currently allow gay marriage, only 11 states do so as a result of legislation or popular vote. The vast majority of states have achieved marriage equality through judicial fiat.

So the idea that Alabama is the 36th state, or the 14th state or the 50th state to achieve marriage equality is an arbitrary metric, determined by a court docket, not the expansive hearts of the rest of the country's voters.

Alabamians need to stop behaving like we have a monopoly on hatred.

When we let the country focus on our intolerance, we let fourteen other states that still deny same-sex marriages off the hook. That gives the fourteen states that are currently considering bills that would exempt individuals from performing marriages for same-sex couples if they have religious objections to it a free pass.

Because every Alabama ex-pat that says "this is why I could never move back to Alabama," reinforces the external viewpoint that retrograde thinking is an inherently Southern trait, which prevents us from having a national conversation about gender equality the same way that it has prevented us from having a national conversation about race.

Alabama has already become synonymous with racism in our nation's textbooks and in click bait media culture. If you mention racial turmoil to anyone in America, they'll immediately think of police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham.

Last month an NAACP headquarters in CO was bombed. Coverage of the event showed black and white photos from the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. These comparisons hurt Colorado as much as they hurt Alabama; because, rather than having a conversation about the history of racial division in Colorado, its citizens can complain that "this act makes us look like the racist South."

We do ourselves a disservice by pretending that racism was defeated 50 years ago and that racism is a strictly Southern phenomenon.

And now, it appears that we are priming ourselves to be the historical scapegoat for anti-gay hatred. So if anyone should be saying "Thank God for Roy Moore" it's the people that voted in favor of Prop 8 in California, it's the governors and justices of every other state that "had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century," because now they won't show up in the history books as the face of intolerance in 40 years. Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore will.

Alabama doesn't own hatred.

We just happen to excel at branding it.

This post was updated at 1:05 on February 12, 2015 to reflect the fact that a federal court overturned California's gay marriage ban.