In a disgusting and vile act of right-wing Jew-hatred — something we do not see too much these days, though it lurks primarily among internet trolls — anonymous robo-calls were made to Alabama voters, allegedly by a Washington Post reporter named “Bernie Bernstein,” supposedly aiming to dig up dirt on Alabama Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. There is no reporter at the Post by that name, and the obviously Jewish-sounding fictitious name, presumably fabricated from that of the Post’s famous investigative journalist Carl Bernstein, was meant to provoke Christian rage at supposed Jewish influence behind the media campaign to take down Judge Moore on the eve of the Alabama vote to fill the United States Senate seat formerly held by our new Attorney-General Jeff Sessions. Thus, the robo-calls were not actually intended to dig up dirt on Roy Moore for the Washington Post, but to spur Jew-haters to the polls to vote for Judge Moore. Pathetic. Really pathetic.

Like all self-respecting Jews, I am disgusted that some hateful and hate-filled Roy Moore backers played that card to generate Christian support for him. And as a rabbi, too, I cannot approach lightly the serious moral allegations against Judge Moore. But as a conservative Republican American who deeply loves my country, as a passionate sports fan who has boycotted the National Football League for the past two months because I will not participate even indirectly in supporting an enterprise that will not robustly support the American flag and all that it stands for — one nation under G-d with liberty and justice for all — and as a firm and faithful believer in traditional religious values as embedded and taught in the Torah, I wish I could be an Alabama citizen just so that I could vote next month for Roy Moore for United States Senate.

Alas, I am not a citizen of Alabama. So I write here to plead with every Republican and Independent voter in Alabama to please vote for Roy Moore. My plea is so urgent and desperate that, against everything ingrained in me, I just split an infinitive. If Republicans do not cast ballots next month to hold that U.S. Senate seat, we instead will be splitting guts.

Let us be clear here. Prof. Frank J. Tipler, among others, has presented a compelling moral argument defending Judge Moore in the face of allegations. So have others. It is a compelling argument. But that is not what impels me. In fact, I would be more sanguine, absolutely so, if the good Judge simply would bow out and assure that Senate seat’s safe Republican hold by deferring to a more attractive alternative like Rep. Morris Jackson “Mo” Brooks. Or if Jeff Sessions would make the ultimate patriotic sacrifice and give up his lifetime’s dream to serve as United States Attorney General, and enter the race belatedly to wrest the seat back. However, it appears that Sessions will not budge, and Judge Moore will not budge, and that the Alabama Republican Party will not abandon him.

These are the times that try men’s — and women’s — lives. We cannot lose the Alabama U.S. Senate seat. We lose too many United States Senate seats that are waiting for Republicans to win. We gave away the seat in Indiana six years ago when Republican state Treasurer Richard Mourdock allowed his opponent, Democrat Joe Donnelly, to slither in over a moronic comment about rape and abortion — as though the real issue at the core of American existence is whether rape victims should be entitled to abortions. We gave away the Missouri seat at the same time over the same foolish issue, as Republican Todd Akin gifted the detested and unsuited Claire McCaskill the seat by getting suckered into entering the same swamp. We had a Senate seat stolen from us by Al Franken in Minnesota when he managed to free his hands long enough to steal the fake ballots that inched him past Norm Coleman. A Senate seat was stolen from us in Alaska when the late Senator Ted Stevens was wrongly convicted on felony charges, thereby inducing Alaska voters to oust him after seven consecutive Senate election wins and nearly half a century as their United States Senator. Soon after he was electorally defeated, all charges and convictions were vacated — thrown out — with the Justice Department finding gross prosecutorial misconduct. And that even was Eric Holder’s DOJ that could not abide the prosecutorial corruption. But the United States Senate seat was lost.

We Republicans throw away United States Senate seats the way that Christians throw out fruit cakes after Christmas and Jews throw out dried jelly donuts after Chanukah. No thinking. No compunction. We’ll just get another one next year. Like a generation reared on the illogical premise that you had to eat your peas and whatever other vegetables you disliked — okra, rhubarb, cauliflower — because there are starving children in India and China (who one day will take your parents’ outsourced jobs), Republicans eat their own because there are liberal finger-pointers preaching a morality and value code that they themselves never would follow. And they keep suckering Republican voters out of United States Senate seats like Lucy pulling the football from Charlie Brown in days that football mattered. They keep suckering — and GOP voters keep falling for it.

Look at the liberals. Yes, they have ousted Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey and Leon Wieseltier. Wow— what courage! But did they ever oust Bill Clinton? Is he not still a favored Democrat speaker? Hillary, who was caught on an audio recording giggling over a rape charge, had no problems conning Democrat women to say “I’m with her.” Are they ousting John Conyers? Yes, it took them less than a “New York minute” to oust Charlie Rose and replace him with the synonymous if not eponymous “Antiques Roadshow.” But howzabout the right honorable Al Franken? They have the goods on Al: one picture is worth a thousand forcible tongue swirls. He is photographed not only groping at a sleeping woman’s breasts but hamming it up for the camera. He similarly has been photographed grabbing another woman’s derriere at a state fair. He has joked about raping Lesley Stahl. He penned a vile and odious Playboy article — and it takes several hours for one to sit and contemplate and draft and edit — where he fantasized about a busty woman at an “Institute of Titology,” whose legs and breast nipples he described with painstaking detail, masturbating him and sticking her tongue into his mouth and swirling it around exactly as he later would do to Leeann Tweeden and causing him — these are the exact words of the United States Senator from Minnesota — to “shoot [his] wad.” He has stood in front of an audience on television and “joked” that a famous and honorable television personality would rub ointment on his little boy and then would pimp friends to come into the boy’s bed to anally rape him. How on G-d’s earth is this pig still in the United States Senate? But the liberals know how to count Senate seats. And so this little piggy is not going to go all the way home, but will cry “Wee! Wee! Wee!” right from his Senate seat in D.C. while throwing blue slips at the President’s judicial nominations.

Meanwhile, Republicans, fearful that there are starving children somewhere, respond by eating their own. With a 52-48 Senate that just barely fails to repeal and replace Obamacare, with a margin so razor-thin that the GOP cannot allow Rand Paul to keep getting himself beaten up and having his ribs broken by neighbors, cannot allow John McCain to leave town and cannot abide him when he is in town, cannot allow Susan Collins to follow her conscience on a few votes that she needs to devote to her Maine constituents, the GOP now would hand over their crimson-red Alabama Senate Seat to Democrats who will protect their stolen Franken seat to the death, even if they ultimately have their Democrat governor roll it over to radical Jew-hater Keith Ellison.

Republicans must not lose that Senate seat. Given that Roy Moore will not step out, Alabama Republicans and Independents simply must vote for him. Rhett Butler learned from Dixie’s Scarlett O’Hara that tomorrow is another day, and everyone then can play a game of “Senate Chicken” (or “Rooster”) as we watch the Republicans and Democrats line up in the town center at high noon, hands at holsters, waiting to see who draws first: Democrats ousting Franken and having their Democrat Minnesota governor replace him or Republicans ousting Moore and having their GOP Alabama governor replace him. Or maybe they both draw and fire simultaneously. Or, probably, neither ousts anyone.

But, dear citizens of Alabama, we cannot lose that Republican Senate seat. That seat and your vote is not about Roy Moore. It is about whether we will have the votes to confirm President Trump’s federal judicial appointments, from the trial judges in district court to the appellate judges in the federal circuits to the next one or two or three Supreme Court justices he names. Whether every single Trump Administration regulation and initiative — from securing the borders to restricting “sanctuary cities” — will be struck down by an Obama appointee in San Francisco or a Clinton appointee in Hawaii, then affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. And these future federal judges and justices either will proceed to preserve this country’s Judeo-Christian heritage, and restore abandoned elements of our American culture and protect our religious liberties and freedoms from further encroachments — or so much more of our national heritage and values will be lost. It is about the future of America — issues including but not limited to protecting the lives of the unborn, building the wall along the Southern border that will keep opioids out, assuring further tax reform, standing up to threats from Iran and North Korea, protecting college students from being railroaded by kangaroo courts convened to convict them of false charges while denying them the rights of counsel and the right to confront their accusers, deregulating the economy, expanding school choice for all children and particularly for those inner-city children who most are failed by the public schools into which they are assigned and which condemn them to lost life possibilities.

That is what is on the line. Not Roy Moore. Not his accuser, the three-time divorcee and two-time bankrupt, who nevertheless may have a legitimate case to make against hm. But she has allowed that case to wait forty years. Why can it not be decided in 2018, side by side with bringing justice to the female victims of John Conyers, Al Franken — and even the victims of Bill Clinton, now that Democrat Insiders from Donna Brazile to Kirsten Gillibrand are racing to signal that the Clinton Era is dead.

For now, meantime, there is one imperative: Roy Moore must be elected to that Alabama Senate seat if he will not step down and if Jeff Sessions will not enter. Vote for Roy Moore in good conscience. And after he is elected, deal with the other stuff with all the morality and good conscience that the moment requires.