For those of you who haven't had reason to trouble yourselves with politics in Alabama since that incredible horny sexting governor story—or, before that, secession—the astonished headlines announcing Roy Moore's victory in the state's GOP Senate runoff on Tuesday might strike you as a bit baffling. Below, I answer all your pressing questions about why another Republican win in a dependable Republican stronghold matters, and why it's caused the President of the United States to do the unthinkable and frantically delete some of his tweets.

Who is Roy Moore?

Roy Moore is a former Alabama state court judge who earned a certain type of notoriety for refusing to remove a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom that he had installed after taking the bench in 1992. In 2000, Moore was elected as Alabama's chief justice after running a campaign that argued, among other things, that the absence of organized religion in the American justice system "corresponded directly with school violence, homosexuality, and crime." Once there, he promptly commissioned a granite version of his Ten Commandments plaque and had it displayed in the Alabama Supreme Court building. Moore lost several subsequent lawsuits, led by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, that sought its removal, and when Moore refused to comply with a federal court order to take the monument out of his courtroom, he was relieved of his position in a disciplinary proceeding before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.

Because this type of behavior qualifies as a feature, not a bug, in Alabama politics, Moore was reelected to the same job in 2012. The same state disciplinary body brought another host of ethics charges against him in 2016, this time centered on his failure to comply with the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Again, Moore lost, and he was suspended for the remainder of his term in May of 2016. After exhausting the appeals process, he formally resigned in April of this year and announced his candidacy for United States Senate. His victory in the Republican runoff all but assures his win in December's general election, too.

I just want to be sure I understand this correctly. The person Alabamans have chosen to represent them in Washington is a former judge who has been removed from office twice because of his steadfast refusal to comply with... the law?

That is correct.

I'm a little afraid to ask this, but what are some of his beliefs?

As you might discern from the anecdotes described above, the greatest danger facing our society today, according to Moore, is essentially the separation of church and state. (Constitution? What Constitution?) In a 2002 child custody case, he opined that homosexuality is "a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it." And he is, of course, a birther, publicly theorizing as recently as December 2016 that President Obama—who at that point had a month left in office—is not a natural-born United States citizen.

Who in the world managed to lose to this guy?

That would be Luther Strange, the former state attorney general who was appointed to the Senate by the governor after Jeff Sessions resigned to lead Donald Trump's Department of Justice. Throughout his brief tenure, Strange has been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and a reliable vote for the agenda of Mitch McConnell, whose super PAC poured some $10 million into Strange's campaign this summer.