“Marshall County voters were the first in Alabama to approve limited ‘home rule’ in 2006. Marshall County voters also were the first to repeal home rule.”- The Arab Tribune.

What this article didn’t mention was why home rule was repealed. The answer: Marshall County was also the first, and so far is the only county, that actually passed ordinances and tried to enforce these new found powers.

Next, we are told by the Tribune that, “In the four years Marshall County had home rule, Cole wrote less than 30 citations to residents for violating the junk ordinance….” One might ask if this small number of citations was the result of benign authority, or the firestorm of opposition that resulted from their initial attempts at enforcement? Were they just nice guys or, after they felt the heat, were they trying to save their political hides by backing off?

You will remember that the first time Marshall County ’s new “Code Enforcement Officer” went on the offensive was against Moss Dalrymple, an elderly rural resident and an American patriot.  Moss was a veteran of three wars, WW II, Korea and Viet Nam . Yet Moss, according to his neighbors, died of a stress-induced heart attack the morning after being visited by Tommy Cole. Cole, of course, tells a different story. He says he was just there offering Moss trashcan pick-up!

The next citation issued was against Jean Tresch and her disabled husband. Jean’s crime was displaying items, which she had picked up and repaired, for sale in her front yard. They were living on $806 a month from social security and she was just trying to keep a roof over their heads. Jean once tearfully asked me, “If they take my home, what are we going to do - go live under a bridge in Huntsville ?”

These two incidents, and others nearly as bad, brought outrage from rural Marshall County citizens, who formed the Citizens for Property Rights (CPR), and rose up in defense of these mostly poor and elderly citizens. When resistance surfaced, the County Commission took an even harder stance.

One of the Commissioners, Buddy Allen, told us that they intended to enforce the law and if we didn’t like it we could vote him out of office. The voters took him at his word. Of the Commissioners who voted to put home rule on the ballot, only Republican Commissioner Stricklend survived the 2010 primary cycle and was re-elected in November. It was a cycle in which, I might add, Micky Mouse could have probably won if he had an “R” by his name.

Commission Chairman Fleming was not so lucky, rejected by the voters in the primary and having effectively sacrificed himself on the altar of home rule, he has now stated publicly that he has been offered a job by the Alabama Association of County Commissioners. The Association has been pushing “limited self-governance” hard since 2006.

As an aside, Bibb County just defeated home rule for the second time, this time by almost a 73 percent vote.  The Bibb County Commission had tried to sneak it in by making it a local amendment, an amendment which, by the way, excluded the ability to repeal it. (They have been watching developments in Marshall County and knew what would happen when they tried to enforce it.)

Sadly, the story that didn’t get reported was the “David and Goliath” struggle for true home rule. That is, the ability to rule your own home, live free on your own property and not be dictated to by government. The people of the CPR have been slandered, they have been called “junkies” and “ignorant hicks” and other names that I can’t repeat in polite company, but to my mind they are heroes in the true American mold. For four long years they gathered thousands of signatures on petitions, raised money at yard sales and cook-outs, wrote letters to the editor (a lot of which were refused publication) and fought an up-hill battle against their own tax dollars to get this amendment repealed. These are not wealthy people. When they passed the hat at their CPR meetings, it came back full of dollar bills, not twenties and fifties like you see at most political functions. They made up for lack of money with dedication and hard work. They gave their time and they sacrificed their weekends to a cause they believed in.

These so-called ignorant hicks organized, raised money, bought bill boards, yard signs, radio spots, wrote newspaper articles, and when they couldn’t get their side of the story published, bought newspaper ads, sent out post-cards to every voter who had signed their petition, fought against deceptive ballot language designed to confuse the voters, and worked as poll watchers until the last vote was counted.

That is the real story. Think about it. Can you name another time where local citizens have stood up against the government and won? When they’ve fought unselfishly for other people’s rights, not just their own, and won?

They proved that our citizens want less government control, not more. The state and national tidal wave of conservatives last week proves that there are more of us than even we had dared to imagine. But we should have known. After all, the Alabama state motto is, “We dare defend our rights.” Sometimes, our citizens just need someone like the patriots of the CPR to give them a wake-up call.