Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a thoroughly sourced report that Roy Moore–the former chief justice of Alabama, hero to the Religious Right, and current GOP Senate nominee–had attempted to date teenage girls when he was an assistant district attorney in his 30s and in one case had allegedly molested a 14-year-old. Since that story broke, several other women have come forward with allegations, including one who says Moore assaulted her when she was 16 years old. Moore has denied the allegations, and most Religious Right leaders have rallied around him, even as some Republican officials have publicly distanced themselves. While it is not clear where these allegations will ultimately lead legally or politically, Moore’s record of extremism and contempt for the rule of law has been crystal clear, and the fact that so many Republican elected officials have been willing to support him in spite of, or because of, that history, is itself scandalous. Moore’s support from Religious Right leaders and conservative evangelical activists and pastors reflects the intense enthusiasm he has generated over the past two decades by waging high-profile battles challenging the separation of church and state and the advance of legal equality for LGBTQ Americans. Moore’s brand of aggressive Christian nationalism, combined with his repeated defiance of court rulings he personally disagrees with, have given him folk-hero status on the Christian Right, which has built political power by promoting the idea that liberal secularists and judicial activists are persecuting American Christians. Apart from the allegations of sexual misconduct, Moore’s public life has been driven by his defiance of the Constitution and rule of law. He stubbornly and repeatedly insists that his own religious beliefs and worldview trump court rulings. He undermines his supposed commitment to religious liberty by arguing that Christians have a privileged place over non-Christians in American law and society. He rejects the core constitutional principle of equality under the law by arguing that gay and lesbian Americans should not only be denied legal equality but should be treated as criminals. Moore has promoted far-right conspiracy theories and hinted of a need for revolution against the U.S. government. He has suggested that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the consequence of America forsaking God’s word and embracing “perverseness and oppression.” And as recently as December 2016, months after even then-candidate Donald Trump had publicly abandoned racist “birther” conspiracies about Barack Obama, Moore was still saying that he believes Obama was not born in the U.S. It should be troubling to people of both political parties that Moore’s political career has been financed in large part by Michael Peroutka, a neo-confederate and Christian Reconstructionist who argues that the Bible and Constitution do not allow the federal government any legitimate role in education, health care or feeding the hungry. In response to critics of his record, Moore adopts the right-wing strategy of demonizing the media. He recently told reporters, “I wish y’all would print me as I am, and not as other people say I am.” But the substance of many criticisms of Moore, including the contents of this report, are drawn directly from Moore’s own words and actions. Alabamians who cherish the fundamental American principles of religious liberty, equality under the law, and the rule of law should recognize that what is at stake in this election is far more important than partisan control of this Senate seat.

Moore’s Contempt for the Constitution and Rule of Law

Religious Right activists have spent decades denouncing judges for putting their own views above the law, but they have celebrated Roy Moore for doing precisely that. Moore’s political career is grounded in a series of confrontations that he and his supporters have used to portray him as a champion of the Constitution and of religious freedom. His record shows that the opposite is true. Moore has been a leading champion of nullification and interposition, strategies supported by far-right activists who urge state and local leaders to defy the federal government on issues like legal abortion and LGBTQ equality. Moore began to make a name for himself among Religious Right activists in the late 1990s, when, as a state judge of the Etowah County Circuit Court, he insisted on hanging a hand-carved copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and made a practice of starting courtroom sessions with Christian prayers. In response to criticism and a court order that he remove the plaque, Moore resisted and religious conservatives like Ralph Reed, Don Wildmon and Alveda King rallied around him, along with local politicians and members of Christian militias. That controversy gave him a political following that he used to run for the position of chief justice, getting elected for the first time in 2000. It was a job from which he ended up being ousted twice for refusing to obey federal court orders. The first time Moore was removed by his fellow judges as the state’s chief justice, in 2003, it was because he defied a federal court order to remove a massive Ten Commandments monument he had installed in the state courthouse in the dead of night specifically to promote his own beliefs that the state and national constitutions require judges to acknowledge the “sovereignty” and supremacy of the God of the Bible. The second time he was effectively removed as chief justice (after having been elected again), it was in 2016 for urging state probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in spite of court rulings to the contrary, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling in Obergefell. Between his stints as chief justice, Moore established and ran the Foundation for Moral Law, which gave him a platform to continue his Christian-nation advocacy and opposition to legal access to abortion and LGBTQ equality; after he was elected chief justice for the second time his wife took over as president of the organization. In 2010, while Moore was at the Foundation, he signed a resolution at a Tenth Amendment Summit endorsing nullification. CNN reported on Moore’s remarks at the event: “I say again, we must fight,” he said. “An appeal to the God of Hosts is all that is left us. They tell us that we’re weak, unable to cope with so formidable an adversary, but when should we be stronger? Would it be the next week? Or the next year? When will it be? When we are totally disarmed, under UN Guard that’s stationed at every house?” At a right-wing event in 2014, Moore spoke sympathetically about secession. And he said his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument he had installed in the state courthouse was an example of interposition, which he called “the step before outright revolution.” When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that state bans on same-sex couples marrying violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law, Moore called the ruling “an immoral, unconstitutional and tyrannical opinion” and urged defiance of the court’s “tyranny.” He declared that “the laws of this state have always recognized the biblical admonition [on marriage] stated by our Lord.” Moore’s ideology and worldview subvert the guarantees of the Constitution to his interpretation of religious duty. “Abuse of Power: The Supreme Court’s Gay Marriage Decision” is a reprint in paperback form, with an introduction by Moore, of his March 4, 2016 “special concurrence” in which he denounced the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision. He writes, “Liberty in the American system of government is not the right to define one’s own reality in defiance of the Creator.” He says the Court’s pro-marriage-equality majority separates “man from his creator” and “plunges the human soul into a wasteland of meaninglessness where every man defines his own anarchic reality.”

Moore’s Attacks on the Judiciary

Religious Right leaders have nursed a grudge against the federal courts for more than half a century, beginning with Supreme Court rulings against segregated schools and upholding separation of church and state, and continuing through decisions recognizing a right to privacy, women’s rights, and legal equality for LGBT people. Moore’s eagerness to purge the courts of judges who don’t share his views poses a significant threat to the independence of the federal judiciary, on which Americans’ ability to pursue justice relies. In an August op-ed, Moore talked about terrorist threats, but said “the single largest threat to our country’s existence” is “activist judges.” He pledged, “I will oppose the confirmation of liberal judges, and I will also support the impeachment of activist judges who are clearly legislating from the bench.” He was more specific when speaking at this year’s Values Voter Summit, a political gathering for Religious Right activists. Speaking of the U.S. Supreme Court, he demanded, “What gives them a right to declare that two men can get married?” Moore called for the impeachment of the justices who supported marriage equality. “They’re judicial supremacists and they should be taken off the bench,” he said. Moore also recently called for the impeachment of the judge who intervened to block Trump’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military, saying, “Congress should not turn a deaf ear to this flagrant usurpation of executive authority.” In August, Moore blamed a “do-nothing Congress” when a federal court upheld the decision of a school board in Washington state not to renew a coach’s contract after he continued praying with his team on the football field after being instructed to stop. “When I get to the Senate, the days of silent submissiveness from the legislative branch will be over,” Moore said. “We will remind the courts, especially the lower courts, how they were created and directed. We will restore the courts to their proper role and we will protect religious liberty.” “The Supreme Court of the United States issues opinions,” he told the Eagle Council in 2015, “and opinions and the law can be two different things.” Moore has a much higher estimation of his own opinions than the Supreme Court’s. In “Abuse of Power,” he calls his response to the Supreme Court’s marriage opinion “unique in the annals of American jurisprudence.” “Never before,” he wrote, “has a Chief Justice of any state issued an opinion in a case clearly demonstrating the illegitimacy of a United States Supreme Court decision and the duty of lower magistrates to refuse to apply such a decision to future cases.”

Moore’s Anti-Gay Extremism

Moore’s Christian Nationalism and Contempt for Pluralism and Genuine Religious Liberty

Throughout his career, Moore has demonstrated his belief that America is a Christian nation whose legal system requires judges to acknowledge the sovereignty of the God of the Christian Bible. “The United States of America is founded on a belief in a particular God—the God of the Holy Scriptures,” Moore wrote in his book “So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom.” He acknowledges that the Constitution “guarantees everyone freedom of thought as well as equal treatment under the law” but his record doesn’t reflect that he actually puts that principle into practice. Moore was among a group of Religious Right leaders published in a 1998 book called “For Such a Time as This: Twenty-Seven Christian Leaders on Reclaiming America for Christ.” In his contribution, he wrote: You can’t be neutral with God. You are either for Him or against Him. A nation can’t be neutral with God. You are either founded upon the laws of nature and nature’s God, upon biblical values, or you’re not. That’s the issue today in America. Are we neutral? At this year’s Values Voter Summit, an American Family Association official introducing Moore said he believed Moore “is the tip of the spear in what we need to usher America back into its place in submission to our Holy God.” Moore is certainly not neutral, and never has been. “The judge, a Baptist, invites others to pray with him in court—as long as they’re not Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist,” USA Today noted in 1997, when Moore was embroiled in controversy. “We are not a nation founded upon the Hindu god or Buddha,” Moore said. Moore said no Muslim or Buddhist would offer prayers in his courtroom because “they do not acknowledge the God of the Holy Bible upon which this country is established.” A newspaper story at the time revealed one reason such rhetoric is so harmful, quoting the driver of a log truck saying the public debate over Moore’s practices and Christian-nation rhetoric was “making it tougher to be one of only a handful of Jews” in his Alabama town. “Our country has always been considered a Christian nation,” Moore wrote in “So Help Me God” (initially published in 2004 and updated during the Obama presidency), favorably citing an 1892 Supreme Court ruling disparaging Muslim and Buddhist beliefs as “the doctrines or worship of these imposters.” In August, in an interview with Vox’s Jeff Stein, Moore quoted Joseph Story’s 1833 “Commentaries on the Constitution,” saying, “It was the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America that Christianity ought to be favored by the State.” In his book “So Help Me God,” Moore complained about Obama saying that America was not a Christian nation and expressing appreciation for Islam, which he called “disparagements of our faith by the President.” In a 2012 radio interview he complained that “false religions” other than Christianity were taking hold in the U.S. Moore is deeply hostile to Islam, which, he told journalist Michelangelo Signorile, is “a faith that conflicts with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported that in 2009 Moore, who has called Islam a “false religion,” told the right-wing Council for National Policy, “about the only thing I know that the Islamic faith has done in this country is 9/11.” His Facebook page, according to CNN, “shared a video that falsely alleged former President Barack Obama was a Muslim.” He also shared a Washington Times article by Franklin Graham saying all Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S. And during his Senate campaign he repeated a false and inflammatory anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, falsely claiming that there are “ communities under Sharia law right now in our country.” Moore’s hostility to Islam is not just rhetorical. In 2006, when Keith Ellison, a Muslim, was elected to represent Minnesota in the U.S. Congress, Moore said in a column for the far-right website WorldNetDaily (WND) that Congress should refuse to seat him. “The Islamic faith rejects our God and believes that the state must mandate the worship of its own god, Allah,” he wrote. Moore cited an Islamist cleric to support the assertion that “Ellison cannot swear an oath on the Quran and an allegiance to our Constitution at the same time.” Moore concluded: But 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.” Congress has the authority and should act to prohibit Ellison from taking the congressional oath today! In 2007, Moore again took to WND, this time to complain about a Hindu religious leader being invited to give the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. Hindus believe not just in a god that is one with the universe and with nature but in many gods, beliefs that are completely inconsistent with a belief in the Creator God of the Holy Scriptures and the Christian faith upon which our nation is founded. Our Founding Fathers knew better – and so should our senators. … It is particularly troubling to see the U.S. Senate disregard a long history of Christian prayers in favor of modern, pluralistic prayers to gods that have no relationship to this country or the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we cherish. Mr. Zed certainly has the freedom to exercise his Hindu beliefs, but only because that is an unalienable right given by the God of creation and protected in this land. Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, etc., have freedom of conscience in this country that is not extended to Christians in other nations under other “gods.” Our government should and indeed must affirm that Almighty God is the source of that right for it to continue. Moore said “the rejection and denial of God at the start of their daily business” was the “surest way” for the Senate to “incur the Lord’s judgment.” Moore’s Foundation for Moral Law represented Christian protesters who disrupted the Hindu prayer. Moore said at the time, “It’s a shame that not one U.S. Senator stood up to defend a tradition that goes back to the very first Continental Congress of acknowledging the one true God of the Holy Scriptures.” Moore has also made ample use of the Religious Right’s cynical strategy of equating criticism of political positions and tactics with an attack on religious freedom and Christianity itself. Moore has said the separation of church and state is “used to exclude Christians from holding public office” and that “Christians are being forced to give up their position in government or else succumb to something that they don’t believe.” Moore has a long association with the Institute on the Constitution, a Christian Reconstructionist group that says a religious test for public office—requiring that office holders believe in the Christian God—is “a logical and consistent protection against those who might drive our constitutional republic in a bad direction.” Moore has railed against his critics at the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, calling the SPLC “probably the biggest hate group in our country because they hate God and they hate anything about God and Christianity, and they’re going to continue their deception by hiding behind that word ‘hate.’” Moore is among those who think Trump’s victory was an act of God. “I’m running for the US Senate because I believe that God gave America a second chance last November,” he wrote in August, “and I want to be part of the leadership team that will make America great again.” “Everybody else thinks it’s the Russians,” he told the Guardian, “I think it was the providential hand of God.” He believes the same about his own primary victory.

Christian Reconstructionism, Neo-Confederacy, and a Radically States-Rights View of the Constitution

Anti-Choice Extremism

Some of Moore’s Other Supporters

Moore’s Christian nationalist religious bigotry and anti-LGBT extremism have not prevented Religious Right and Republican Party leaders from embracing his candidacy. Indeed, for many of them, like the American Family Association’s anti-gay and anti-Muslim font of bigotry Bryan Fischer, Moore’s extremism is his appeal. “Roy Moore was deplorable before it was cool to be deplorable,” says Sarah Palin. Moore’s Senate run was embraced by some Republican leaders during the primary, and by others after he defeated incumbent Sen. Luther Strange for the GOP nomination. Among those who backed him for election were President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as well as former White House advisors Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Steve Daines and Rand Paul were among his endorsers, along with right-wing House leaders Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and all six House Republicans from Alabama. Lee, Cruz, Cornyn and Daines have withdrawn their endorsements since the accusations of sexual assault and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Moore nemesis, has urged him to drop out of the race. Liberty Counsel and its leader Mat Staver represented Moore in his failed legal effort to avoid suspension. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins called the charges of judicial misconduct that led to Moore’s suspension “nothing but trumped up charges meant to make an example of anyone who dares to stand up to the forces of political correctness and follow state protocol in judicial decisions.” Jerry Falwell Jr., James Dobson, Mike Huckabee and Phil Robertson are all on Moore’s team of Christian conservatives. Among the figures supporting Moore’s candidacy is Gordon Klingenschmitt, the Religious Right activist and former Colorado elected official who said in a 2016 email that he was “overwhelmed with grief” when Moore was suspended from the bench, complaining that “homofascist sodomites are now openly persecuting and removing Christian elected officials.” The anti-LGBTQ activists at the National Organization for Marriage produced a video endorsement of Moore, calling him “a champion for marriage, life, and religious liberty.” NOM’s Brian Brown praised Moore for calling the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling “an immoral, unconstitutional and tyrannical opinion.” Brown has also raised money for Moore’s campaign. David Whitney, a Maryland pastor affiliated with Michael Peroutka’s Institute on the Constitution, has had Moore speak from his pulpit on numerous occasions. Whitney calls Moore his “good friend and Christian patriot.” He has praised Moore’s actions “to stand for God’s Holy institution of marriage” and against “sodomite unmarriage” and he criticized Moore’s suspension by “a kangaroo court.” Whitney called Moore’s suspension “a persecution of a Christian who stood on the principles of God’s word and acted in office based upon what is lawful and right.” Gun Owners of America, a group that thinks the National Rifle Association is too quick to compromise on gun legislation, endorsed Moore in the hope that he will help them pass federal legislation to deregulate silencers and allow someone with a concealed carry permit from one state to carry in another state. Moore has pulled guns out of his wife’s purse and his pocket at events.

Moore’s Record and Agenda as a Judge and Politician Should Disqualify Him