In June, 2011, when Roy Moore was flirting with a run for president, he paid a visit to Heritage Community Church in Severn, Maryland. Moore was at the time best known having been removed from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a result of his refusal to comply with a federal court order to remove a 2.6 ton monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court. For this, at Heritage Community Church, Moore was a hero, and the assembled crowd relished his meandering, homespun disquisition on the sovereignty of God’s law over the laws created by men.
Moore is in the news again — and again, it’s over his defiance of the authority of federal courts to decide matters of constitutional law. His claim that a federal district court’s ruling striking down Alabama’s constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage is invalid, and his subsequent order to Alabama’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, stem from the same ideology that drove his Ten Commandments spectacle: that politicians, judges, and the “tyranny of men” are trying, unconstitutionally, to subvert God’s law…
That showdown between God and government is at the heart of Moore’s claims that he is on the side of righteousness and the federal courts on the side of an anti-God, unconstitutional “tyranny.” Moore believes there is a separation of church and state — but he believes it’s one that distinguishes America from royal monarchies. In other words, the government is separated from the church in that the government is barred from running the church, and it can’t tell the church what to do. Public schools, in his view, are “controlled by government,” and impose secularism; he favors tax credits for homeschooling because that’s “the right of the parent.” …
Moore, who graduated from West Point and served in Vietnam, is fond of reiterating the he has sworn to uphold the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. He readily agreed that America has been overtaken by enemies within. “Our government is infiltrated with communists, we’ve got Muslims coming in and taking over where we should be having the say about our principles.” And more: “I’m not so sure some in government don’t want to destroy our country.” …
Moore… favor[s] the election, rather than the appointment of judges, to guard against the judicial “tyranny” they claim is undermining the Constitution, and therefore, God’s law. A woman in the audience, who said that Obama was not qualified to be president, based on another IOTC-promoted claim that he was not a “natural-born citizen,” asked, “how do we prevent people who don’t worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from holding political office in America?”
To his credit, Moore admitted there’s no way to stop that, because “it’s up to the people” to elect leaders. In Alabama, where judges are elected, that has meant the voters gave Moore another chance to turn their state into an embarrassment.
—Sarah Posner
Close Encounters With Roy Moore
