Opinion | Two Governors, Two Visions of a New South

Last week, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, a Democrat, signed an executive order pardoning 175,000 marijuana convictions, saying, “Today, we take a big step forward toward ensuring equal justice for all.” But, he said, “this won’t be our last effort. We must continue to move in partnership to build a state and society that is more equitable, more just and leaves no one behind.”

Meanwhile, Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a Republican, has recently signed several bills that he says are intended to “expand faith in public schools.”

One requires teachers and other school employees to address transgender students using the pronouns for the genders listed on their birth certificates — “God gives us our mark,” Landry said. The governor, The Advocate reported last year, “has an intensely anti-L.G.B.T.Q.+ record, having opposed anti-discrimination protections even though he has a gay brother” and, as Louisiana’s attorney general, he “pushed the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth.”

Earlier this month, as nola.com reports, Landry also signed a bill to “block transgender people from using facilities in schools, prisons and domestic violence shelters that align with their gender identity.” In a statement, he said that the bill “protects women’s safety and reinforces the very definition of what it means to be a woman.”

And as you’ve probably heard by now, another of the bills Landry just signed requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all Louisiana public-school classrooms, including at state-funded universities. “If you want to respect the rule of law,” Landry said, “you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” (The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi is almost certainly older, but I won’t get too technical.)

The paths taken by these two relatively young governors, one from the Upper South and one from the Deep South state from which I hail, represent opposite visions of what the South stands for and what its future should be.

According to the Census Bureau, the South is the largest region of the country, containing the most people and the most states (16, plus the District of Columbia), and stretching from Texas to Delaware.

When people think of diversity, they often think of America’s coasts, but consider this: The South is home to the most African Americans, the most Hispanic immigrants and the most L.G.B.T.Q.-identifying people of any region. In 2020, Pew Research reported that it was tied with the West as the region where, overall, the most immigrants live.

According to the 2020 census, Maryland is the only Southern state — and only one of three in the country — in which the percentage of people identifying as white has dipped below 50 percent.

And Maryland is embracing diversity in its many forms. Under Moore’s leadership, the state has enhanced access to and protections for gender-affirming care. Moore has championed the Enough Act, which will provide at least $15 million in the state budget for various grants to programs in areas where a significant percentage of children are living in poverty.

I spoke to Moore on Monday night, and he told me that he believes in freedom for all and doesn’t understand how the people of any state could have “a love of freedoms” while “your policies are restricting them.” He says that he is making the idea of leaving no one behind more than a motto but a governance philosophy.

Contrast his vision with the political trajectory of Louisiana, where officials are stifling freedoms and tilting toward Christian nationalism. In the span of a few weeks, Landry signed bills into law that authorize state and local law enforcement agencies to arrest undocumented immigrants and that classify two abortion medications as dangerous controlled substances.

In November, Mike Johnson, the Louisianian speaker of the House, told CNBC that “The separation of church and state is a misnomer.”

He insisted that in the most famous use of the phrase, in Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson was explaining that the Founders “did not want the government to encroach upon the church — not that they didn’t want principles of faith to have influence on our public life.” But, of course, the speaker’s claim doesn’t account for the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which clearly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

One of these ideologies — egalitarianism or oppression — will eventually win out in the South, but Moore isn’t passively waiting to see which one does.

He said that he is actively recruiting teachers from states that are restricting the teaching of history and recruiting businesses from states that are restricting reproductive rights. He wants people who live in states that are suppressing individual freedoms to consider relocating to his state, where an expansive view of liberty prevails.

Moore repeated what has become, for him, something of a mantra: “I want to make bigotry expensive.” He continued, “I want to make sure that there are economic consequences to states that are continuing to restrict the rights of their citizens. And I want Maryland to be the beneficiary of it.”