Roy Moore, the former judge who won Alabama’s Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, is no stranger to state politics. Nor is he a stranger to controversy.
He’s shown time and again that he holds the word of God above that of the Constitution, a view that has gotten him into trouble more than once.
“I want to see virtue and morality returned to our country and God is the only source of our law, liberty and government,” Moore said just last week in a debate with Luther Strange, who lost the GOP nomination despite millions of dollars in Republican backing and an endorsement from President Donald Trump.
Here’s a taste of what’s to come if Moore wins the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He’ll be facing off against Democrat Doug Jones in the Dec. 12 special election.
10 Commandments controversy
In 2003, Moore was removed as chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court after he erected a 5,200-pound monument of the 10 Commandments inside the state’s judicial building. Lawsuits were filed contending that it represented a government-endorsed display of religion.
Moore later huffed that he was being asked to leave office because he “acknowledged God.”
“God has chosen this time and this place so we can save our country and save our courts for our children,” he said at the time.
“Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it."”
Views on same-sex marriage
Moore was re-elected to the bench in 2012, but was suspended again last year after he was found guilty on six charges of violating the canons of judicial ethics. In 2014, he wrote letters to governors of every state asking for their support in a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. In 2015, he ordered Alabama judges to defy a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling and instead enforce their “ministerial duty” by refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses.
“We are talking about someone who is truly, truly unhinged,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. “He has concocted legal theories to justify his religious goals, but none that makes any sense.”
Moore’s opposition to same-sex marriage doesn’t stop there. In 2002, he opined that the state should be expected to keep children away from homosexual parents.
“Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it,” Moore wrote.
He said in 2005 that homosexual conduct should be made illegal.
Thoughts on other religions
He referred to Islam as a “false religion” that opposed the First Amendment earlier this year.
He’s not into public prayer, either, if those praying aren’t Christian.
“We’re having prayers [by] atheists? We’re having Wiccans say prayers? How foolish can we be?” Moore asked in 2014, in response to people in Hunstville, Alabama, being allowed to pray before city council meetings. “There is one God and it’s the God on which this nation was founded. And it’s the God of the scriptures.”
Moore argued to prohibit Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) from entering Congress after he put his hand atop a Quran instead of a Bible during his swearing-in.
“Islamic law is simply incompatible with our law,” Moore wrote in World Net Daily, a right-wing news website, in 2006. “Common sense alone dictates that in the midst of a war with Islamic terrorists we should not place someone in a position of great power who shares their doctrine. In 1943, we would never have allowed a member of Congress to take their oath on ‘Mein Kampf,’ or someone in the 1950s to swear allegiance to the ‘Communist Manifesto.’”
Abortion poetry
Here’s a passage from a poem written by Moore in 2007:
America the Beautiful, or so you used to be,
Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, I’m glad they’re not here to see,
Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand.
Your children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine,
Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain.
From sea to shining sea this Nation has turned away,
From the teaching of God’s Law, and a need to always pray.
9/11 was punishment for godlessness
Moore suggested in a speech this year that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S. were because America had distanced itself from “the one that has it within his hands to heal this land.” God isn’t happy, he implied, because the U.S. legitimizes sodomy and abortion.