Screenshot : Tom Parker for Supreme Court

The man who could replace Roy Moore as the next chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court is a lot like Moore—only more racist and homophobic.


Let’s be clear. Roy Moore is a racist. Moore insinuated that the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, should be repealed. He said that the last time America was great was during slavery. He insisted that President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. But of course, even when he was accused of racism, his wife insisted that was impossible because one of their lawyers “is a Jew.”

Moore, who lost his bid to replace Gollum Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate, served as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court until he was removed in 2016 for instructing probate judges not to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage. This was Moore’s second time being ousted from the state Supreme Court. In 2003, he was removed when he failed to comply with a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse grounds.


While Moore’s repeated smacking down should be comforting, the state of Alabama does not have a shortage of racist, homophobic Jesus freaks elected to public office. If the Cleveland Cavaliers roster were as strong as Alabama’s list of racist Republicans, the Golden State Warriors wouldn’t stand a chance.

Allow me to introduce Associate Justice Tom Parker, the man whom Alabama Republicans chose to fill Moore’s vacant seat as chief justice.

In 2004, Parker was photographed handing out Confederate flags at a funeral. Even though that sounds like an egregious offense, the men he posed with were even more despicable. He was flanked by Leonard Wilson, a board member of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, which describes black people as a “retrograde species of humanity”; and Mike Whorton, a leader with the League of the South, which advocates for the secession of Southern states.

That same year, Parker attended a party in Selma, Ala., for Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the first leader of a little-known organization called the Ku Klux Klan (yes, the potato salad was terrible). Parker’s 2016 Supreme Court campaign was supported by another ally and neo-Confederate, Michael Peroutka, who travels the country preaching about merging the Bible, the Constitution and Confederate values.

Oh, and racism. Always racism.

Despite what you may think, I am not revealing any new information to Alabama’s GOP voters. It’s not that Southern Republicans somehow keep stumbling across white men who just happen to be bigots—It’s what they want!


In a 2010 ad, Parker compared U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips, who supported gay marriage, to a terrorist, explaining: “Most people believe that al-Qaida is one of America’s biggest security threats; I think it’s time to add liberal activist judges like Judge Phillips to that list.”

That was his public pitch to voters!

In another court brief, Parker suggested that Alabama ignore gay marriage by using a legal precedent established by a runaway slave. Look, don’t ask me. I don’t know how that works, either. And, I suspect, neither does he.


All I know is, attending a meeting of Alabama’s Republican Party must be like going to a ... well, I don’t think there’s anything as racist by comparison. I was going to say a Ku Klux Klan meeting, but one man lifted his hood before lighting a cross and said, “Come on Mike, I might be racist, but I’m not Tom Parker racist.”

On the positive side, unlike Moore, at least Parker doesn’t troll high school parking lots and mall food courts looking for girls to date.


Parker might run into a stray Negro in one of those places.

No one wants that.