I'm originally from a state like that and living in a bit more enlightened one. I have very mixed feelings about the prevailing mindset/attittude in my home state, those similar to the people you saw on Facebook. Those people are my family members, friends' parents, and even teachers. It's somewhere between anger, pity, and disgust.

You have to understand that these people are unhappy (mostly due to economic reasons) and are being spoonfed media bullshit all the time. Some of them are legitimately hateful, but a lot are just not very bright and have terrible bullshit filters. It doesn't help that the South's culture is pretty generally reviled elsewhere in the US and that they get brain-drained pretty bad.