SOURCE:
THE FEDERALISTURL:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/11/14/roy-moore-never-conservative/by John Daniel Davidson
On Monday, a fifth woman came forward with allegations that Roy Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16 years old and he was a prosecutor in Etowah County, Ala. The accusations to date are both plausible and disgusting. When Moore was in his early thirties, he allegedly sought out and sexually assaulted numerous teenage girls, including a 14-year-old.
Moore has denied it, sort of, although his weird interview with Sean Hannity on Friday left the strong impression that the charges are most likely true. Yet it’s hard to understand why voters in Alabama are only just now realizing that he is unfit for office.
They should have known years ago, when his contempt for the rule of law twice got him removed from the Alabama Supreme Court. It’s worth recounting those incidents because they reveal that Moore is no conservative and has little use for the American constitutional order that conservatives hold dear. That he was embraced by a significant number of social conservatives, and still enjoys significant support among some evangelicals, is yet another sign that the conservative movement has lost its way.
Roy Moore Has a History of Contempt for The LawMoore’s trouble with the law began shortly after he was elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000 and promptly had a 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments installed in the state judicial building’s central rotunda. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued, demanding the monument be removed on the grounds that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. A federal district judge and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals both agreed, and ordered Moore to remove the monument. He refused, and in November 2003 the Alabama Court of the Judiciary unanimously voted to remove Moore from office, a decision the Supreme Court of Alabama upheld in an April 2004 ruling.
Moore returned to the bench in 2012, winning an election to become, for the second time, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. At that time, gay marriage was a going concern. When a federal district judge in Mobile struck down Alabama’s marriage laws as unconstitutional in 2015, just months before the U.S. Supreme Court was set to hear Obergefell v. Hodges, Moore declared that the federal judge’s order was not binding in Alabama. He issued a decree prohibiting probate judges in Alabama from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Relative chaos ensued. Alabama’s attorney general at the time, Luther Strange, told probate judges to consult a lawyer about their obligations.
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell meant nothing to Moore. Six months after Obergefell, he issued an administrative ruling to lower courts that “Alabama probate judges have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license” contrary to existing state law. In other words, he was ordering them to defy the Supreme Court. For this, Moore was suspended for the remainder of his term by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.
Moore’s View of the Constitution Is Anti-AmericanAs a result of these battles, Moore became something a martyr to some social conservatives, who mistakenly believed he was standing athwart history in the name of religious freedom, or moral clarity, or something. Too many conservatives conflated Moore’s crusade against the federal judiciary with the persecution that Christian cake bakers, florists, and pro-life groups now face at the hands of progressive state governments in California and elsewhere.
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