If you need any more evidence that we still live in a nation in which bigotry and intolerance, often tinged with the threat of theocracy, is still alive and well, you can find it in this news report.
Two gay men with developmental and intellectual disabilities were kicked out of a public pool in Kentucky.
I was born in Alabama in 1946, and grew up to maturity in the middle of the Civil Rights Era of the 1960's in Birmingham, Alabama.
I remember well how much fun we as children in the 50's had. Our parents would take us into North Birmingham (we lived out 'in the country' north of the city, it was not yet suburbs at that time), so that we could swim in the city pool at the North Birmingham Park. Those are some of my fondest and most vivid childhood memories of summers growing up in Alabama.
The drive to pass Civil Rights legislation insuring equal accommodations, however, did not sit well with the citizens of Birmingham.
So when they realized they were about to be forced to allow Blacks and Whites to swim in the same pool, they did the obvious.
The closed the city swimming pools. All of them. City wide.
I just looked at North Birmingham Recreation Park, where that pool I remember was, and I cannot even find a trace of it on the ground. The park now has a baseball field, and other athletic field facilities.
That pool is gone with the history of the time.
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