While President Donald Trump has ordered the renaming of the Gulf south of the border to be renamed “The Gulf of America,” Alabama has yet to follow suit.
The House State Government committee on Wednesday voted to advance a bill that would follow that course, bringing the state one step closer to aligning with the national renaming.
House Bill 2 by Representative David Standridge, R-Hayden, would require state and local governments to follow the name change on new maps, education materials, documents, official communications and websites. It would also require a reasonable effort to update pre-existing resources such as signage.
Representative Prince Chestnut, D-Selma, questioned whether the bill would impose a burden on teachers to update existing educational materials, but Standridge assured him only new materials would be required to reflect the name change.
“My wife’s a teacher and I asked her. I said ‘What would you do if you had a big map?’ And she said ‘Oh, well we deal with that kind of stuff all of the time. I would just put something over it and move on,’” Standridge said.
Reps. Marilyn Lands, D-Huntsville, and Barbara Boyd, D-Anniston, voted against the bill, which will now move to the full House for consideration.
“I just see us spending a lot of time passing a lot of bills that don’t really matter much to the average person,” Lands said.
The committee also heard another bill dealing with nomenclature, hearing comments on HB81 by Representative Mark Gidley, Hokes Bluff, that would prohibit the use of the term “West Bank” to describe Israel’s West Bank. The bill would require instead that government agencies in the state refer to the region as “Judea and Samaria.”
The Associated Press style guide, used as a guide by many newspapers and media outlets, still advises to use the terms “Gulf of Mexico” and “West Bank.”
Gidley relied on Biblical passages to support the name change for the area west of Israel’s Jordan River.
Like the Gulf of America bill, HB81 would not require resources and documents made before the passage of the law to be updated. The committee did not vote Wednesday on the bill.
