Senate candidate Amy Minton joins the Heart of Dixie Podcast

State Senate candidate Amy Minton recently joined the Heart of Dixie Podcast with Brandon Moseley and Harry Still III to talk about her campaign. Minton is a member of the Alabama Public Library Board, a member of the Alabama Republican State Executive Committee, and she is the Vice Chairman of the Etowah County Republican Party.

Minton is a wife and mother. She lives in Rainbow City. Minton is running for Senate District 10 challenging incumbent Senator Andrew Jones (R-Centre).

"One of the reasons I am running you were talking about early in the podcast about the session. if you'll remember the last week of the session this past year in the Senate, it was held up a few days and partly because our current Senator Andrew Jones was trying to regulate a private property, somebody's 4,000 acres, it's actually Indian Mountain ATV Park, trying to regulate somebody's private property."

Jones had a bill (SB254) that would have strictly regulated what the owners of ATV Parks can do on their own land. That bill died in the House of Representatives. An angry Sen. Jones retaliated by filibustering. The Gulf of America bill, the death penalty for child rapists bill, the scholarships for law enforcement families bill, the school chaplains bill, and the Ten Commandments bill were just some of the GOP priority bills that passed the House but could not get out of the Senate.

"I actually called him, and I asked him to please stop that, because our local legislators, Mac Butler, Mark Gidley, and Craig Lipscomb, had bills that needed to get on the Senate floor. And he was holding it up so they could not get on the Senate floor," Minton charged. "They had already been through the House. They had already passed. They just needed that last part of the Senate." "I just feel like there is a gap that we need somebody, a senator who will work with our representatives and get their bills passed."

Minton said that she is part of a military family and supports veterans.

"My husband was a Marine so I'm a huge supporter of veterans, veterans' mental health," said Minton. "My husband's grandfather, he was the one who originally got me to really thinking about this. He was on the USS West Virginia when it was bombed in Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941). And then he was moved to the USS Enterprise - and he was only 21 years old. And he was ended up in the Doolittle raids, Battle of Midway, and Battle of Solomon Islands. And I talked to him and he was like, Amy, please do your part in letting, you know, helping people remember the price of freedom and that freedom is not free. It does take individual lives, individuals given so much of themselves and their families. And the battle is not over on the battlefield. It comes home with our military men and women and they live with it the rest of their lives. And so I want to do everything I can to support our veterans and veterans mental health. And like I said, My brother-in-law was in Delta Force. He came home from Vietnam, same situation."

Minton emphasized her life experiences preparing her for the State Senate.

"So many of the things I'm standing for and talking about, I have lived, I have done," said Minton. "I've stood up against gender ideology. This is not just something that I say I'm gonna stand up against. My daughter was in medical school at UAB and she was given a chart of 73 genders. And so I stood up against that. I've had many experiences to stand on these things. And so I feel like that I would continue to do the same thing if I were elected as the state Senator."

Minton, in her role on the state Library Board, has championed a policy of requiring that sexually explicit and books promoting juvenile gender transitioning be moved out of the children's section of libraries across the state. Since then the state's law protecting children from unscrupulous doctors transitioning them before they are 18 years of age has been upheld by the federal courts and President Donald J. Trump (R) has issued an executive order banning any public entity that accepts federal dollars from promoting the gender transitioning of children. Minton and the library board are considering a new library policy that would remove those offensive materials from the libraries altogether as they promote conduct that is illegal under Alabama law and because the library system takes federal dollars. The Board is also reconsidering how they address sexually explicit books in the library.

"We've just opened back the code up so we're gonna have a 45-day public hearing (public comment period) and when we finish that 45 days we just got it back from the Attorney General's office we will know exactly what we will do once those 45 days the public hearing (public comment period) are over, we just had one for sexually explicit books," said Minton. "The reason we did not include gender ideology and sexual orientation in that public hearing and that opening of the of the code was because at the time we didn't have state laws or President Trump's executive order. Now we have true definitions for the state of Alabama of what a male and a female are that we did not have last year when we opened up the code originally. We also have the executive orders that says no federal funding can be used to promote gender ideology or sexual orientation, and that's President Trump's executive order."

"The library board receives around $3 million federal funding," Minton explained. "Another law that has just recently been passed is VCAP. You know, that was on hold and Alabama led the way with that, and so now, of course, you cannot have physicians practicing child mutilation, basically, with children, and so we want to align the state library board code to reflect that. We don't want books at tax dollar expense going against something that is currently the state law."

Critics have accused the library board of censorship.

"This is not the same thing as banning a book because anybody can go down, they can order it on Amazon," said Minton. "Like I said, no library has all the million books that are published every year anyway. So they are already doing selective choices by not putting every book in the library so we're just saying the ones that are against the law currently in Alabama so in other words if it encourages like there's one book called Hearts and Parts that's in that's for children that's in the children's section at Fairhope Public Library right now. There's just an article published about this particular situation but a second grader goes in and looks at that book and it literally tells them if they are not comfortable with who they were when they were born. They can take medicine, have the surgery, and then you will be happy. That's what the book says. So for books like that, we're saying that is against Alabama law. So we do not think those books should be in the library."

Jessie Battle is also running as a Republican for the District 10 seat.

The Republican primary is scheduled for May 19, 2026.

The Heart of Dixie Podcast is cohosted by Alabama Gazette Lead Reporter and Content Manager Brandon Moseley and Baldwin County attorney Harry Still III.

For comments or questions email the author at brandonmreporter@gmail.com