My friend Sarah Knafo, a formidable French member of the European Parliament, recently introduced me to a word that has haunted my thinking about Alabama’s governance: culpabilité.

The French use it to describe something deeper than guilt: a paralyzing, institutionalized sense of collective shame that prevents forward motion even when the path ahead is clear. Alabama, which bore witness to both the worst depravities and the most luminous triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, suffers acutely from this condition.

The paradox is this: Alabama, whose cities became the stages upon which moral courage confronted injustice – Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma – now falters in applying the enduring truths that once animated its redemption: principles grounded in Scripture, natural law, and Aristote

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