Roy Moore’s relentless political sanctimony has made him the
darling of adoring evangelicals in the Bible belt State of Alabama. He’s fashioned
his entire judicial career as an attorney and state Supreme Court judge attempting
to impose his religion upon the populace by defying the law. Now he’s a controversial
candidate for Alabama Senator and the question is whether his creepy religious
sanctimony will save his career again.
I posted in March or 2012 that Moore was Alabama’s Chief Justice
for three years but was forced off the court in 2003 by a unanimous 9-member judicial
ethics panel after he defied a federal court order to remove a 2.6 ton stone
monument of the Ten Commandments he had commissioned himself and placed at the
courthouse. It constituted a government endorsement of religion in violation
the federal Constitution First Amendment Establishment Clause.
He put himself above the
law by "willfully and publicly" flouting the constitution
the ethics panel concluded. “God has chosen this time
and this place so we can save our country and save our courts for our
children," Moore defiantly proclaimed. "I will continue
to acknowledge the sovereignty of God."
Then by some miracle of miracles in 2015, he won an election to reclaim his former job as Chief
Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. The people of Alabama seem to love their
religious extremists. They want their justices to follow the word of God – not the
Constitution. Religious extremists are drawn to Moore like moths to a flame.
And flouting the law is exactly what Judge Moore did once
again. He refused to abide by a federal court judge who ordered Alabama county
probate judges to issue marriage licenses to gays. And he ordered all Alabama
probate judges to ignore the federal court decision and continue to deny
marriage licenses to gays. He doesn’t believe that gays are entitled to equal
protection of the law.
Then he defied the
United States Supreme Court. “The court now holds that same-sex couples
may exercise the fundamental right to marry,” US Supreme Court Justice
Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. “No longer may this
liberty be denied to them.” Oh yeah? Tell that Judge Roy Moore. He wasn’t
listening. He wasn’t learning. So another Alabama judicial ethics panel
booted him off the Court again.
That’s why he’s unfit
to be a judge, and that’s why alone, without any other bad deeds in his past,
he’s unfit to be a U.S. Senator.
But his adoring Christian
evangelical supporters have made him a Republican candidate for U.S. Senator – because he’s convinced them that, despite
everything, he is a moral upstanding man of God. It’s OK with them that Moore
has sanctimoniously flouted the law and the Constitution; they want to make him
a lawmaker.
Well,
now five credible women so far who don’t know each other have come forward to
accuse his honor of aggressively pursuing them romantically as young teenagers
when he was an Alabama district attorney aged well into his thirties, and two
say in detail that he sexually assaulted them in the process.
"Mr.
Moore attacked me when I was a child," said Beverly
Young Nelson, recounting that Moore was a regular customer at a restaurant
where she worked as a waitress when she was 15 and 16. She described a
harrowing chain of events that ended with Moore attempting to force her into a
sex act in a parked car -- an episode that, she said, left her with severe
bruising on her neck.
Moore
claims he doesn’t know Ms. Nelson, even after she produced her 1977 high school
yearbook including this inscription signed by him: "To a sweeter
more beautiful girl I could not say 'Merry Christmas' Christmas 1977 Roy Moore,
D.A. 12-22-77 Olde Hickory"
We have to wonder whether
his creepy religious sanctimony will save his career again.
No comments:
Post a Comment