This is an opinion column.

An Alabama legislator was appalled. So he raised hell. Surely you read about it.

So then the sleepiest of Alabama governors rolled over and decried the woke. Maybe she was just grumpy at the thought of having to wake up.

Gov. Kay Ivey forced the head of Alabama’s Early Childhood Education program – one of the very few education bright spots in a state so known for school failure that it has to bribe companies to move here – to resign.

Which means early Childhood Education Secretary Barbara Cooper was fired, of course. For using a standard and nationally accredited teachers’ manual that included references to (gasp) systemic racism, (egad) white privilege, and (OMG) families that don’t have a standard mom and dad and two kids and a dog.

That manual said horrid things. Like how kids and families are different and you should probably be nice to them anyway. Imagine.

It was scary, because it might remind teachers that a real world exists beyond the white walls and whitewash of the Alabama Legislature.

So Rep. Jamie Kiel, R-Russellville, got to be appalled. And applauded by his ilk. Ivey got to go back to sleep. And Cooper got the boot.

But that was just the start.

As AL.com’s Rebecca Griesbach reported, the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education then began to examine its early learning and development standards. And by examine I mean the department went at it with a machete.

Those dedicated educators chopped out 10 references to “equity,” a clearly subversive word meaning “justice according to natural law or right,” which is not welcome or fitting for Alabama schools or public buildings or brains.

They looked at their work. And it was surely good. For justice removed is injustice ignored in Alabama. It’s what we are built on, and what we must keep from our children.

These public servants searched and searched, and chopped and chopped more fiercely, as if clear-cutting old forest for a suburban stripmall. By the end they cut 60 of the 65 references to equity – including a whole chapter – right out of the Alabama education standards.

Surely, like God on the sixth day, they looked at all they had done, and, behold, found it very good. They’d whittled all those references to equity, all those notions of kindness and acceptance and attempts to understand people who are different, to a number even a state legislator can count on his fingers.

They cut references to equity from 65 to 5. – a 92.3 percent drop, if you’re counting. Which is the most Alabama thing ever.

We have normalized meanness and intolerance and doubled down on delusion, in a state that wrote a constitution – the politicians said it out loud, you know – to keep Black people away from the polls and in their place.

We have made examining that sort of history in schools illegal, and talk of it a firing offense, in a state that for generations used school textbooks as propaganda to tell students how slaves really liked being slaves, that white masters were really just looking out for their interests.

We’re full tilt into an Alabama inquisition, where compassion is ridiculed and common decency demonized.

We do the thing that represents us so well.

We edit equity right out of our expectations. Because we don’t want students or their parents to see the truth.

We remove equity from our schools. There is no place for compassion there, or examination of ourselves.

It is so Alabama. Where we break what is good – like our early childhood program – just to pander for what is bad.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.