Ruckwart’s Landing, Alabama — Alabama Republican Todd Winklemeyer thinks his party is making all the right moves in his home state. Winklemeyer has been a registered Republican since he was 16 years old, saying that “even though [he] wasn’t old enough to vote at the time” he knew “who would always be on the correct, God-fearing, ammo-hoarding, red-white-and-blue-wearing American patriot side of things” so he registered as a Republican at that very early age. Winklemeyer says though, that there was always one issue — the prohibition of marijuana — that never sat well with him, and he even attempted to run for the Alabama state house in 2000 on a platform of bringing medicinal marijuana to the Yellowhammer State, but he lost his bid to a more conservative contender from Ft. Under-Dücking, a town just a few files south of Ruckwart’s Landing.

All that is why Winklemeyer says he is “pleased as punch” that the Alabama Senate moved a bill out of committee that would legalize medical marijuana in Alabama this week. “This is a victory for individual liberty,” Winklemeyer told The Political Garbage Chute. “It’s a victory for fans of small, un-intrusive government. It’s a victory for people who think that as long as an adult isn’t harming anyone else, that they should feel free to conduct their private affairs in whatever way they see fit,” the 52-year-old Republican told our reporter. “If this bill passes — and God willing it will — it’ll signal the end of the government insinuating itself into things it has no business legislating. Personal and arbitrary morality should never be the basis of a law, and making pot legal — at medicinally at first — will push the pendulum back toward freedom and personal responsibility.”

Winklemeyer says he doesn’t care if other Republicans think he’s being “soft” on crime, or that he’s encouraging further moral decay by supporting the effort to legalize weed in Alabama. “It’s just the right thing to do,” he told us. “We have to err on the side of letting people live their lives. If it doesn’t hurt you personally, and let’s face it pot is less dangerous than booze and cigarettes, we don’t have a say in what you put in your body, period.”

So does Winklemeyer’s pro-freedom stance extend even further, to Alabama’s LGBT community? His state is one of many in the country that still allow an LGBT person to be fired or denied employment based on the grounds of sexual orientation. Gay marriage used to seem like a far off fantasy in the Cotton State, but now that Republicans in Alabama like Winklemeyer support legalizing pot, surely a more relaxed, less intrusive stance on marriage is coming from the state’s Republicans too, right?

“Oh hell no!” Winkleymeyer shouted into the phone. “There ain’t no law in the Bible against tokin’ up. But God didn’t let Sodom and Gomorrah stand free, gayin’ it up all over the place did he,” Winklemeyer asked rhetorically. “No, sorry, the Bible forbids man-on-man love, and I for one think we need more secular laws that follow religious laws.” So he’s saying he understands Sharia law’s appeal to radical Islamic fundamentalists? “What the fuck, son? No! There’s a big difference between me and Mohammed McJihad out there in Syria right now.” What is the difference, we asked him. “They’re Muslims. I’m a Christian. They believe in their god, but I believe in the one, true, American-liberty tested God of the Christian faith. I have right on my side. duh-doy.”

We asked Winkleymeyer if he feels his pro-freedom stance on pot is contradicted by the fact that he supports barring homosexuals and transgender people from the act of marriage based on his own, personal religious beliefs. “Not at all,” he told us. Then he summed it up as succinctly as he said he could. “The bottom line is a simple one. Life ain’t so bad for the gays here in Alabama. I mean, look at it. We don’t mind if you smoke pot; just don’t smoke pole later, when you’re high is all. Is it so much to ask that you curb your natural, sexual impulses that harm no one for the benefit of me and others like me that are programmed to feel icky about something that has literally zero impact on my life?”