October 25, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — If Judge Roy Moore is elected to the U.S. Senate in the special election on December 12, on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, his record shows that he will become the most reliable and consistent social conservative in the United States Senate. Most importantly, he will have gotten to the US Senate without any help; not from the left or right wing media, not from President Trump or the Never Trumpers, and certainly not from the Republican Party establishment.
To the left, Roy Moore represents the backwater citizens who as Obama famously put it get bitter, and cling to their guns or religion. To the cosmopolitan and suburbanite right, whose luminaries are mostly based in New York City and Washington D.C., Roy Moore represents one of those religious zealots, the inconvenient type that ignorantly lacks the “prudence” to keep God hidden from public life.
The reality is that Judge Roy Moore is a man of the kind we have not seen in American politics for a very long time, perhaps since the Founding Fathers. A humble man, repeatedly willing to sacrifice his professional aspirations to uphold a great principle.
Roy Moore was born in Alabama, the son of a construction worker and World War II veteran and a homemaker. He attended West Point and served in Vietnam, after which he attended law school and entered private practice. He then entered public office as a prosecutor and then a circuit judge.
Throughout the 90s, Judge Roy Moore was a special target of the ACLU in a series of cases over pre-court prayers and a hand carved display of the Ten Commandments that hung on the wall of his court room. This ongoing battle with the ACLU culminated in 1998 when the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled in favor of Judge Moore on a technicality.
In 2001, widely recognized as a Christian man of unshakeable conviction, Judge Moore won the statewide election to the position of Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Within six months he was sued by the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Americans for the Separation of Church and State over a new marble display of the Ten Commandments. By 2003, Chief Justice Moore was removed from the Supreme Court of Alabama by an unelected legal and political committee called the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. I recently wrote an article that describes in detail how then Attorney General Bill Pryor colluded with other political actors to further his own professional aspirations by successfully prosecuting Judge Moore.
In 2012, Roy Moore once again won the statewide election for Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court despite being outspent roughly 10 to 1 in both the primary and general elections. Within a few years, Justice Kennedy and four other liberal justices on the Supreme Court invented the “fundamental right” to homosexual “marriage” and great pressure was brought to bear on local municipal officers in conservative parts of the country to perform civil “marriages” for same sex people. In Alabama, 81 percent of the people had voted in favor of the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment in 2006, which limited the definition of marriage to one man and one woman. Citing the state Marriage Amendment, Chief Justice Moore issued an administrative order to probate judges and their employees ordering them to obey the state constitutional amendment until all federal appeals were exhausted. In May of 2016 Judge Moore and his entire staff were summarily dismissed.
This brief history of Judge Roy Moore helps to begin to dismiss the popular narrative espoused by the likes of National Review's Jonah Goldberg that Roy Moore is “nothing more than a bigoted, theocratic, and ignorant buffoon” or as the main stream media sees him, a bigoted populist product of the era of Trump.
Nothing could be further from the truth. To really know Roy Moore, we have to look deeper than the Ten Commandments cases and his opposition to Obergefell.
A brief survey of Judge Moore's judicial opinions shows what a colossal mistake conservatives — whether they dwell in Manhattan, New York or Manhattan, Kansas — would be making who dismiss or attack Judge Moore.
Opinion on the Sanctity of Life
The Hicks v. Alabama (2014) case involved a woman who ingested Cocaine while pregnant and was convicted of the crime of chemical endangerment of a child. The defendant, represented by attorneys closely associated with the abortion industry, argued that the baby in the womb could not be protected by the chemical endangerment statute, because the unborn baby could not be considered a child. Judge Moore's concurring opinion, from beginning to end, is a perfect example of what pro-lifers expect in a judge:
“I write separately to emphasize that the inalienable right to life is a gift of God that civil government must secure for all persons–born and unborn,” and
“A plain reading of the Equal Protection Clause, therefore, indicates that states have an affirmative constitutional duty to protect unborn persons within their jurisdiction to the same degree as born persons.”
Unfortunately, the idea that the preborn child deserves the equal protection of the law is one that even most pro-life organizations have given up on. Fortunately, Roy Moore has not.
Opinion on family
In the Alabama Policy Institute (2016) case, Chief Justice Moore described the exercise in judicial tyranny that was the Obergefell decision in the following manner:
“Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” and
“The great sufferers will be the children — deprived of either a paternal or a maternal presence — who are raised in unnatural families that contradict the created order.”
In this magisterial opinion, Chief Justice Moore represents a majority of conservatives who desire public officials to answer the call to defend the constitution by demanding the separation of powers and a reasonably limited interpretation of the power of judicial review.
In effect, in the Alabama Policy Institute case Justice Moore simply refused to allow a simple majority of unelected judges to legislate their moral preferences into the constitution. Anyone wishing to have a good legal grounding on the way to stop the runaway judicial tyranny that is transforming our country into Sodom and Gomorrah should read this opinion in full.
Opinion on religious liberty
In Yates v. El Bethel Primitive Baptist Church (2002) Chief Justice Moore issued a dissent in which he showed great respect for religious liberty. Based on the internal disputes of a Baptist church, which ended up in civil court, Chief Justice Moore used his dissent to articulate a detailed interpretation of the proper jurisdictional interaction between civil authority and church authority. Justice Moore concludes by explaining the reason for his dissent in the following terms:
“In dissenting, I do not mean to comment upon which party to this controversy is legally “right.” I write only to express my disagreement that a court of this State may enter into an ecclesiastical dispute regarding church government. This trespass is especially egregious when the dispute has yet to pass through that religious society's established appeals process, and the church Discipline expressly prohibits the ousted Board members from proceeding in civil court.”
As Matthew Chapter 7 Verse 16 states, you will be able to tell them by their fruits.
The fruits of Roy Moore's public and professional career are incontrovertible. He has taken every opportunity to be an advocate of the idea that life, family and religious liberty are firmly grounded constitutional principles worth putting one's personal reputation on the line. He has been scorned by the elite and stripped of his job. He is just a man, and like any man is flawed, but he has been a witness to the scriptural passage that promises that God does not light a lamp only to hide it.
In the United States Senate, Roy Moore will surely be a bright lamp shining on The Hill.