Sep 28, 2017

Who Is This Firebrand, Alabama Judge, Roy Moore

Help him win a U.S. Senator seat in December. Call your Alabama friends... Send him money ... Pray for him.

Here is the heart of Judge Roy Moore's victory speech after he won the Alabama, Republican primary election, from Senator Luther Strange, to run against the Democrat Candidate in December. It will give you an idea of what kind of U.S. Senator he will make ... in Washington.

"As long as it's constitutional, as long as it advances our society, our culture, our country, I will be supportive. As long as it's constitutional. But we have to return the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to the United States Congress.
"I believe we can make America great, but we must make America good, and you cannot make America good without acknowledging the sovereign source of that goodness, the sovereign source of our law, liberty, and government, which is Almighty God.
"We have become a nation that has distanced ourselves from the very foundation. [George] Washington said that of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports."
Who Exactly Is Roy Moore?
From CNN News
The former Alabama state Supreme Court chief justice has won the Republican senate primary runoff in Alabama, so he stands a good chance of becoming the next US senator out of Dixie, despite running up against a heavily funded Republican establishment pick in the primary and now facing Democrat Doug Jones in December.
Even with President Donald Trump asking his backers to cast a ballot for Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to the in-demand seat after Jeff Sessions left to take over the Justice Department, the heat down South was with the firebrand. On Monday night, Breitbart boss Steve Bannon joined the candidate for a rally in Fairhope. He also has the support for right-wing favorites Sarah Palin and Sebastian Gorka. 
But Moore is hardly a product of the present political moment. In fact, he's something of a throwback to a different era of conservative rule -- the George W. Bush years, when his virulent anti-gay, right-wing views made him a national figure.
Roy vs. Rove
"For Mitch McConnell and Ward Baker and Karl Rove and Steven Law, all the instruments that tried to destroy Judge Moore and his family, your day of reckoning is coming," Bannon said at the Monday night campaign rally.
This particular round of animosity is tied to McConnell's efforts, through the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC, to beat back Moore's Senate bid with a flurry of attack ads. But Rove and Moore go further back.
During the 2000 race for the chief justice seat on the Alabama state Supreme Court, Moore's establishment competition, Associate Justice Harold See, drafted Karl Rove to help his wealthy but increasingly unhealthy campaign. To no avail. Moore won the Republican primary, avoiding even a run-off, with 55% of the vote. He defeated the Democratic nominee in the fall and began his first term in 2001.

Roy, the "Rock" and gay marriage

Moore is most famous for the fights that twice led to his departure from the state's high court.
In the 1990s, Moore had done legal battle over a wooden "Ten Commandments" plaque in his courtroom. But after taking over as chief justice, he escalated -- planting a granite monument to the commandments, weighing in at more than 5,000 pounds, inside the state supreme court building.
A series of legal challenges, successful ones, eventually left Moore with a choice: either follow federal orders and remove the rock or be removed himself. And so he was, in November 2003, by a judicial ethics panel
Moore ran and won again in 2012. But again, he defied a federal court decision -- this time striking down state laws banning same-sex marriage -- and found himself facing off with the same ethics body that effectively ousted him nearly a decade earlier. In April of this year, he resigned his post to pursue Sessions' vacated seat.

Roy takes on same-sex parents

The controversies that marked Moore's brief tenure, the first of two abbreviated terms, on the Alabama Supreme Court were not limited to his decorating tastes. A child custody case in 2002 was less of a national cause célèbre, but Moore used the outcome, and his concurrence, to author a vicious attack on same-sex parents.
"I write specially to state that the homosexual conduct of a parent -- conduct involving a sexual relationship between two persons of the same gender -- creates a strong presumption of unfitness that alone is sufficient justification for denying that parent custody of his or her own children or prohibiting the adoption of the children of others," he said in one of the opinion's more tame passages.
In others, Moore labeled "homosexual conduct" by parents as being "detrimental to the children," writing that it "is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this nation and our laws are predicated."

Roy's poetry

Moore has often spiced up his political rhetoric with live renditions of original verse. Here's a snippet from one widely quoted poem. It begins, ruefully:
America the beautiful, or so you used to be.
Land of the Pilgrims' pride; I'm glad they'll never see:
Babies piled in dumpsters, Abortion on demand,
Oh, sweet land of liberty; your house is on the sand.
Too soft to put a killer in a well deserved tomb,
But brave enough to kill that child before he leaves the womb.
If you want to read more, this October 2015 feature from The Atlantic includes an extended recollection of a poem Moore recited during a convention of Southern Baptists.

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