If you needed to run yonder to Bessemer for that easement to cross Scuzz McWhorter’s field so’s you can dig up all the lead shot what gramma’s blasted out there from the kitchen porch over all these years, let it wait till Tuesday, son: Alabama done went down to the beach in honor of the Confederacy!

Yes, it is another first Monday in June, which means it is Jefferson Davis Day, Alabama’s official commemoration of the Confederate States’ first and only president. A holiday still celebrated by two thirds of state residents. The only state holiday, in fact, to commemorate ol’ JD. Offices are closed, just like they would be on Confederate Memorial Day and Robert E. Lee Day in Alabama! Go home, get grilling, get wet, get stupid, and reflect on the things that matter in life.

It’s a peculiar holiday, given that Jefferson Davis’ birthday is actually on June 3, and also given that Davis was born in Kentucky, ruled in Virginia, fled through the Carolinas and Georgia, retired in Tennessee, and settled in Mississippi, with only the briefest of layovers in Alabama. And also because Jefferson Davis was the head of a fucking racist tyrannical state whose fucking reason for fucking existing was its fucking insistence on the treatment of enslaved human beings as fucking chattel to enrich fucking people like Jefferson Davis.

But, you know, it’s June. And it’s nice out! Lay in the recently repainted bed of the ’79 El Camino and soak up the states’ rights.

Meanwhile, here is an op-ed from the chaplain of the Sons of Confederate Veterans explaining why “Jefferson Davis deserves the respect of Alabamians.” For, you see, Davis was a reluctant secessionist, who went rebel only after “he realized the Northern majority was going to forcibly impose its will on the South.” And he “had to lead a mostly agricultural people in the hasty formation of military forces against an enemy determined to invade and subjugate.” Mostly agricultural in the sense that Davis’ people profited off of agriculture produced by the minorities they subjugated.

That’s Sons of Confederate Veterans chaplain Barry Cook, honoring secessionist president Jefferson Davis, on the 208th anniversary of his birthday, in the year of our lord Two Thousand and Fifteen. Roll Tide.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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