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Peggy Wallace Kennedy argues that Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore is more dangerous than her father, Governor George Wallace

(File photos)

Peggy Wallace Kennedy is the daughter of Alabama Governors George and Lurleen Wallace

By Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of Alabama Governors George and Lurleen Wallace

Floating the banner of "States Rights" to promote a policy of discrimination is nothing new to Alabama, but the latest shot over the bow by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore wherein he has ordered Alabama's Probate Judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples goes too far. Chief Justice Moore does not have the right to promote his personal agenda like the average politician does because in Moore's office in Montgomery, the law matters.

When my father, Governor George Wallace, stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama, it was a political gesture of appeasement to those that elected him to promote and defend the culture of racism and segregation that were as much a part of the South as its pine forests and cotton fields. My father did not travel to Tuscaloosa to debate with Nicholas Katzenbach on the merits of states rights. He was on a mission to fail and he knew it, but his politics required that he continue to insist on Standing Up for Alabama as he had promised the voters he would.

There was no excuse for the politics of exclusion that Governor Wallace promoted in the 1960s. He and other segregationists were on the wrong side of history and caused many Americans to suffer as a result. But my father was a politician first and foremost and as such had every right to ride on the wings of public opinion because his opinion mattered.

And now over a half-century later, Roy Moore has picked up the tattered flag of state's rights to voice his opinion on the issue of marriage equality.

Demagoguery is as much a part of the American political tradition as kissing babies. It is the engine that drives voters to kick the can down the road and into the voting booth. Politicians are encouraged, expected, and entitled to have their own opinions, freely expressed, to discredit their opponents, and rail against the government. That is, unless, they are members of the judiciary where their opinions should not count. And therein lies the distinction between Governor George Wallace and Chief Justice Roy Moore.

George Wallace was able, by virtue of his office, to take political advantage by publicly promoting a theology of discrimination, but Roy Moore cannot. George Wallace was not confined by a code of ethics that restricted his right to rabble rouse, but Roy Moore is. And most importantly, George Wallace was not required to promote the notion of impartiality and fairness but Roy Moore must. Justice Moore ran for Alabama's highest executive office twice and missed the mark. The black robes he wears daily for the job he was elected to do should remind him that his opinions cannot trump the law.

The politics of my father and Moore may be worthy of comparison on issues of their character and failure to commit to protecting the civil rights of all, but Moore is the more powerful of the two, for he and his brethren on the bench have the right to have the last word. The first plaque that southern civil rights lawyers hang on the wall just beneath their diploma reads "thank God for the federal courts." The notion that only the federal courts are competent to protect the civil liberties of Alabamians is unconscionable. The citizens of Alabama are entitled to better.

Alabama voters have an unfettered right to elect demagogues to the executive and legislative branches. But more importantly, all Alabamians have a moral right to seek impartial justice in the courts.

Unlike Governor George Wallace of the 1960s, Justice Roy Moore today cannot stand on the three-legged stool of state's rights when to do so would infringe on the common rights that all Americans are guaranteed. Chief Justice Moore should be a protector not a purveyor, and that makes his grandstanding all the more dangerous.