Based in Birmingham, Al., Eric Velasco has been a freelancer since 2012, writing about judicial politics and other matters. He was a daily newspaper reporter for nearly 30 years, covering Alabama courts and judicial politics from 2005-2012. He is co-author of “The New Politics of Judicial Elections 2011-12,” a biennial study of judicial campaign financing and influence published by Justice at Stake, the Brennan Center for Justice and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Since his earliest days as a county judge, Roy Moore has followed a higher law, one he considers more sacred than even the U.S. Constitution. His belief that God’s word and the Ten Commandments supersede federal authority has already cost him the post of Alabama’s chief justice once, but he’s battled back to hold the same office once again. And once again he’s picked a showdown with the primacy of federal judges.

Through many battles in many courtrooms, he’s emerged as one of the Christian right’s greatest heroes—one of the few politicians willing to stand against the tide of immorality swamping American society. In his mind, he’s adorned in the silver armor of a crusader, wielding the sword of God’s law in one hand and gripping a shield against sin and tyranny with the other.


So even as word leaked this week that President Barack Obama had long backed same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court seems likely to rule later this year that same-sex marriages should be legal across the country, Roy Moore intends to stand in the way.

Same-sex marriage, he warns, “will be the ultimate destruction of our country,” and he has become a national symbol of defiance in the aftermath of U.S. District Judge Callie Granade’s rulings in late January saying Alabama’s “Sanctity of Marriage Amendment” is unconstitutional.

On Good Morning America this week, Moore prophesied, “Do they stop with one man and one man or one woman and one woman? Or do they go to multiple marriages? Or do they go to marriages between men and their daughters and women and their sons?”

Alabama politicians rarely avoid a chance to thumb their noses at federal authority. But Moore is the lone state political figure who has called for state judges to ignore Granade’s ruling. Most elected officials have said they still oppose same-sex marriage but defer to the federal judge’s decision.

On Sunday night, hours before a temporary stay of Granade’s ruling was set to expire, Moore ordered state probate court judges not to issue licenses. That threw Alabama into a patchwork quilt of compliance that will be the subject of a federal court hearing on Thursday.

Moore has made a career portraying himself as a crusader for God’s law, a Daniel tossed in with the lions of a sinful society. A former kickboxer, Moore rarely met a moral fight he did not want to pick. He has proved he is not afraid to fight to the bitter end in furtherance of his beliefs.

“He’s a combative guy, no doubt about it,” says Bill Stewart, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama and the state’s leading political expert. “He likes to get into scraps with those who oppose his views.”

In 1995, a state judge ordered then-Etowah County Circuit Judge Moore to remove from his courtroom a wooden plaque quoting the Ten Commandments. Moore parlayed the controversy into election as the state’s chief justice in 2000. Ever the provocateur, Moore then commissioned a 5,300-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments and had aides work under the cloak of darkness to install it in the rotunda of the state judicial building.

The resulting lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other groups led a federal judge in 2003 to order Moore to remove the monument. Moore refused and continued digging in his heels even after a federal appellate court ruled against him. On November 13, 2003, the state Court of the Judiciary ordered Moore removed from office.

Nearly a dozen years later and after the state’s voters returned him to the chief justice post, Moore again is waving his sword at the federal judiciary. In interviews this week, Moore said he was unsure whether he would acquiesce even if the U.S. Supreme Court rules this summer in favor of same-sex marriage in all states. Meanwhile, the SPLC has filed ethics charges seeking state sanctions against Moore.

“He is more interested in being high priest than he is chief justice,” says Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC, which has battled the chief justice for years. “He sees it as his mission to recognize the supremacy of biblical law in Alabama.”

This week’s battle—which may come to a head at the hearing Thursday and begin a process that might again cost him his job—may well turn out to be his final crusade in a career filled with quixotic battles against advancing secularism. It may also turn out to be one of the nation’s final showdowns over an issue that in barely a decade has gone from highly controversial to mundanely accepted.

Born to Battle

Roy Stewart Moore, who celebrated his 68th birthday in the midst of his showdown this week, was born in the northeast Alabama town of Gadsden, the oldest of five children. The family, which often could not afford homes with indoor plumbing, also lived briefly in Texas and Pennsylvania between stints in Alabama. Moore graduated from Etowah County High School in 1965.

Attending the military academy at West Point on a scholarship, Moore graduated at the height of the Vietnam War. With braggadocio, he would later say his reputation for discipline as a military police stockade commander in Danang, South Vietnam, led him to bunker down at night surrounded by sandbags out of fear of being “fragged” with a grenade from his own troops.

After his discharge in 1974 at the rank of captain, Moore graduated from the University of Alabama law school. He soon joined the Etowah County District Attorney’s office, where he earned the ire of the political establishment for speaking out against prosecutors’ pay and convening a grand jury against a judge’s wishes.

Moore lost a bid for a circuit court judgeship in a 1982 campaign during which he accused the court of accepting payoffs. Some say Moore was run out of town after he survived two sets of ethics charges that some consider political payback.

He moved to Texas and became a professional kickboxer, even winning a tournament in his old hometown before moving to a ranch in Australia to work briefly as a cowboy.

In 1985, Moore moved back to Gadsden, where he married the former Kayla Kisor, a divorced mother 14 years his junior. After an unsuccessful election run for district attorney, he started a private law practice. On his office he hung a wood plaque he had made years earlier listing the Ten Commandments.

Moore was among the wave of conservative Southern Democrats who switched parties in the early 1990s. That paid off in a 1992 appointment by a Republican governor to a vacant seat on the Etowah County Circuit Court. Moore hung the Ten Commandments plaque on a wall behind the bench. Like many Alabama judges at the time, he started sessions with a prayer.

One of the first complaints about Moore’s religious display came from a lawyer for two male strippers accused of murder. The prayers drew the interest of the American Civil Liberties Union, which considered filing a lawsuit. Moore was in the midst of a campaign for a full term as judge when word of the ACLU’s concerns hit the media. In conservative Alabama, the notoriety only helped his early career: A local celebrity by Election Day, Moore won handily.

The ACLU filed suit in 1995, demanding removal of the plaque and an end to pre-court prayers, but the case went nowhere. A state countersuit led to a state judge’s ruling that banned pre-court prayer but allowed the Ten Commandments plaque in its context as a foundation for modern law.

Moore responded by announcing he would continue the prayers and dismissing any secular intent behind his Ten Commandments display. Angered, the judge ordered the plaque removed, but an appeal fizzled out before reaching the Alabama Supreme Court, and no action was taken against Moore.

By then, Moore was a national celebrity, considered a champion for the Christian right. State polls showed nearly 90 percent of residents supported Moore’s quest.

Alabama was emerging as a judicial election battleground in the late 1990s. Fresh off engineering a Republican takeover of the Texas Supreme Court, Karl Rove began working with the Business Council of Alabama to wrest control of the court from plaintiff trial lawyers and the Democratic justices they backed.

Alabama Supreme Court hopefuls were among the first in the nation to routinely raise and spend at least $1 million on what once had been mundane elections. Campaign ads got so ugly, one by a sitting justice compared his challenger to a skunk.

The Republican takeover of the Alabama Supreme Court was nearly complete when supporters recruited Moore to run for chief justice. In Moore’s only million-dollar campaign, he won in the primary over Rove-backed Justice Harold See and in the general election over Sharon Yates, then an appellate court judge.

Alabama politicians routinely fly their Christian beliefs like a banner. But Moore has taken it to an extreme. “My mind has been opened to the spiritual war occurring in our state and our nation that was slowly removing the knowledge of that relationship between God and law,” he said in his inaugural speech.

Moore’s judicial philosophy may best be summarized by the name of the organization he established, now run by his wife, Kayla—the Foundation for Moral Law.

The Justice’s Fall

Workers had to grunt and heave as they labored overnight in July 2001 to haul 2½ tons of carved granite up the steps of the state judicial building and place it under the rotunda where no one could miss it. The next morning, Moore unveiled his newest tribute to God’s law and sovereignty. “May this day mark the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people,” he said at the news conference.

A lawsuit filed by the ACLU, SPLC and Americans United for Separation of Church and State created the showdown that ultimately led to Moore’s removal from office. In early 2003, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ordered Moore to remove the monument, threatening the state with daily fines. Several thousand people began protesting at the state judicial building while Moore unsuccessfully appealed. After the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Moore’s case, Thompson extended his deadline. Moore continued to defy the federal judge’s direct order.

Moore’s fall was complete within months. His colleagues on the state high court voted in late August to remove the monument, which was put in storage temporarily. That November, the Court of the Judiciary ordered Moore removed from office.

Moore’s fall marked the rise of Tom Parker, Moore’s assistant during his initial term as chief justice. In protest of Moore’s removal, Parker won a seat on the Supreme Court in 2004. He tried to engineer a court takeover in 2006 when he ran unsuccessfully for chief justice (while retaining his associate justice seat) and put up a slate of poorly financed challengers who were defeated in the Republican primary.

Parker, who remains on the court, is cut from the same bolt of cloth as Moore. In 2006, Parker gained national notoriety when he argued that the Alabama Supreme Court was not bound by an earlier U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the death penalty for juvenile killers. Parker now is considered one of the leaders of the “personhood movement,” which seeks to create the legal conditions for the nation’s high court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Defrocked, Moore traveled the country, speaking out against immorality and liberal governance. He made two failed bids for Alabama governor and toyed with running for president under the Constitution Party banner. In fact, he was considering a presidential bid for 2012 when he decided instead to seek his old job as Alabama’s chief jurist.

Thousands of contributions—as small as $5—poured in to Moore’s campaign from every state. But Moore’s top funder was Michael Peroutka, former presidential candidate for the Constitution Party.

On campaign stops, Moore railed against federal policies, President Barack Obama and homosexuals. He called for the state to get back to God. And in a statement that would later strike some as ironic, Moore told supporters, “We’ve got to go back to that U.S. Constitution.”

A Triumphal Return

If Mitt Romney had been a better candidate in 2012, Alabama might not have Roy Moore as its chief justice today.

Romney’s failure to sew up the Republican presidential nomination before the Alabama primary on March 13, 2012, turned out Moore’s power base to vote for Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who cruised to a 1-2 finish ahead of Romney in the Yellowhammer State.

Political experts believe Moore would not have survived a runoff. He was running against the governor’s hand-picked chief justice (an appointee seeking a full six-year term) and Charlie Graddick, a former state attorney general and current circuit court judge. Moore’s outright victory in the primary so stunned state party officials, they felt the need to call a news conference days later to say they would, indeed, back the voters’ choice as the party’s nominee.

Behind the scenes, officials from both parties desperately scrambled to find an alternative. An anemic state Democratic Party—led at the time by a former state Supreme Court justice—had failed before qualifying to recruit anyone to run for the high court. Only a fringe candidate was running as a Democrat.

Democrats finally found their man in Circuit Judge Bob Vance, a civil court judge based in Birmingham. Vance is the son and namesake of a federal judge who was assassinated by pipe bomber Walker Leroy Moody in 1989. The Democrats booted the other man off the ticket and replaced him with Vance with less than two months remaining before the election.

Vance spent $1 million during his brief campaign but still lost to Moore in a relatively tight race. Moore, who promised he would not bring back the Ten Commandments monument, stayed mostly quiet after resuming office as he dealt with a severely underfunded court system.

Moore found the spotlight again after Granade opened the door for Alabama to become the 37th state to allow same-sex weddings. Moore questioned the federal judge’s legal authority and urged Gov. Robert Bentley to fight back.

“We must act to oppose such tyranny!” Moore wrote in a January 27 letter to the governor. “Our State Constitution and our morality are under attack by a federal court decision that has no basis in the Constitution of the United States. Nothing in the United States Constitution grants to the federal government the authority to desecrate the institution of marriage.”

Both the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court declined state requests to block enforcement of Granade’s order until the nation’s high court resolves the issue in June. Hours before the stay expired, Moore issued a six-page edict ordering county probate court judges to not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Obey, Moore warned, or the governor will rain fire, brimstone and impeachment.

Even after Bentley announced he would take no action against any judge regarding same-sex marriages, many refused to issue licenses to gay couples, citing Moore’s administrative order. Others, aware that Granade’s ruling was based on equal protection grounds, stopped issuing marriage licenses to anyone. In Mobile County, the probate court simply refused to open for marriage licenses.

Critics say Moore has no authority to dictate how state officials will issue licenses. Even though he is the head of the courts he, for example, does not have budgetary control over probate court.

Moore, whose office did not respond to an interview request on Wednesday, sees it differently. A single unelected judge is subverting the will of Alabama voters, who approved the Sanctity of Marriage Act by a four-to-one margin in 2006. Until the U.S. Supreme Court speaks on the issue, a district judge’s opinion carries no weight in Alabama, Moore contends.

“State courts are not bound by the opinions of lower federal courts,” Moore wrote in a February 3 letter to the association of probate court judges. “Furthermore nothing in the orders of Judge Granade requires [emphasis original] Alabama’s Probate judges to issue marriage licenses that are illegal in Alabama.

“Alabama Probate judges are not subject to the orders because probate judges are not parties or associated with any party in those cases,” he wrote. “Not only is the Mobile federal court acting without constitutional authority, but it is doing so in a manner inconsistent with the Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Demagogue or True Believer?

Roy Moore has always been vocal about his fundamentalist views on social issues and the need for limited federal government power.

But some of his most pointed comments are about homosexuality. In a 2002 custody case involving a lesbian mother and the child’s father, Moore wrote in a concurring opinion that homosexuality “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.”

During campaign stops in 2012, he railed against same-sex marriage. “Same sex marriage will be the ultimate destruction of our country,” he was quoted by a newspaper as saying during a county Tea Party chapter rally that fall. “It destroys the very foundation upon which this nation is based.”

Many have compared Moore’s actions this week to George Wallace’s in 1963, when the governor physically blocked access to the University of Alabama in defiance of a federal desegregation order.

The two men are comparable in some ways. Both were circuit court judges who rose to power by preaching a populist message. Both decried federal intrusion into state sovereignty.

But Moore’s current situation is more defiant speech than defiant action. He can’t simultaneously stand in the doorways of probate courts in all 67 counties. Each day since Granade’s stay was lifted on Monday, fewer state judges have continued following Moore’s administrative order.

Another difference is that Moore stands alone among state officials in calling for open defiance of Judge Granade’s order.

“He’s just unilaterally urging probate judges not to do something,” says Stewart, the retired professor who is updating a book he has written about Alabama’s Constitution. “He is not getting much support from state officials that I can see.”

Nor is Moore’s current situation comparable to the Ten Commandments controversy that led to his removal from office in 2003—yet. For now, there is no direct order addressing Moore for him to officially defy.

That may change in a hearing set for Thursday afternoon before Granade, after which she is expected to order full compliance. Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed an official complaint with the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, the same panel that filed the formal charges that led to Moore’s removal in 2003.

But unless Moore refuses to follow a direct court order demanding that he take or refrain from a specific action, the state Court of the Judiciary is unlikely to remove him from office, experts say.

So is Roy Moore a political opportunist, a true believer or a combination?

Because he will turn 70 before the next chief justice election in 2018, Moore is barred by the state constitution from seeking reelection. But some observers say he is positioning for yet another run for governor in 2018.

“George Wallace used the race issue to propel his political career,” the SPLC’s Cohen says. “Roy Moore uses the religion issue to propel his. In both cases, it’s demagoguery.”

Stewart, who has closely followed Moore’s career since his days on the Etowah County bench, leans more toward Moore as true believer.

“People look on him as sort of the chief theologian of Alabama,” Stewart says. “I think he’s doing it because he really believes he is doing the right thing. Most of us would believe that compliance with the law is what we should do. But he claims allegiance to what he believes is a higher law.”