March 27

Newly elected Mayor of Alabaster, Alabama, Selwyn Montgomery, had the distinction of being the southern city’s first black person to hold this office - a personal triumph for the great great grandson of slaves who had labored on a peanut farm in this very community. After winning by a landslide, Montgomery hit the ground running by passing two ordinances regarding public health. The first required all public school children to present up-to-date immunization records on the first day of school, or be turned away until such records be made made available or immunizations updated. The ordinance made provisions for children whose immunizations were not up-to-date to receive virtual lessons via the internet, until their parents were in compliance. The second ordinance devoted the City’s annual financial surplus to the funding of free immunizations for all school-aged children living within the Alabaster city limits. 

While most applauded the Mayor’s bold stance on the issue, 8th generation Alabasterian Wendell Montgomery III, (no blood relation) a member of The John Birch Society, founder of The Alabaster Southern Heritage Brotherhood, and loser, by a wide margin, of the recent mayoral election, did not. “Monty,” as Wendell Mongomery III was called, had run on a ‘personal freedom/hands-off government’ platform which had not appealed to many locals. With respect to the new vaccine policies, he cried foul to the media, stating, “The people of Alabaster, where my family has been farming peanuts since 1803, before Alabama was even a state, will come to regret their choice of mayor. Selwyn Montgomery is already showing total disregard for the civil rights of the private citizen. Today, he’s forcing y’all to vacinate your babies. Tomorrow, he’ll be telling you how to make love to your women and raise your sons. This vaccine business is exactly the sort of dangerous government interference that exemplifies why we need to get back to the south of yesteryear, when the rights of the individual man were given some respect.”