Happiness is boring a hole in your Hebrew slave’s ear with an awl, or so might well say Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice and Baptist zealot Roy Moore.

Before I get to Moore and his grotesque, faith-lathered absurdities, though, a quick digression. Not a week goes by without our egregiously pious politicians outraging rationalist champions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate and onetime Southern Baptist preacher, indicated he would, as head of state, obey the Supreme Being, not the Supreme Court, at least as regards same-sex marriage.

His rival and fellow evolution-naysayer Ben Carson urged his Christian co-religionists to stand up to “progressive bullying,” even though Christians account for seven out of ten Americans, and hardly amount to some beleaguered minority nonbelievers could push around, even if they wanted to.

And the Republican National Committee continues its affiliation with the Christian fundamentalist activist group, American Renewal Project, whose director, David Lane, is now calling for the establishment of Christianity as “the official religion of America.” Lane may have taken cues from that morose stalwart of antipathetic reaction, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Don’t forget, a year ago Thomas, a Roman Catholic,aired the malodorous opinion that the First Amendment (which starts with “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) “probably” – italics mine, yes, sic, only “probably” – “prohibits Congress from establishing a national religion,” but should not hinder individual states from doing so.

With justices like Thomas, and if a Republican wins in 2016, the Supreme Court may well end up serving as the Doric-columned ossuary of the remains of our once gloriously godless Republic.

Now we come to Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore. Speaking last week at the Family Research Council, a hyper-conservative Christian lobbying group in Washington, D.C., Moore defined the pursuit of happiness as a by-product of observing the often malicious edicts and baleful pronouncements pervading cock-and-bull fables originating with pastoral, semi-nomadic primitive tribes two or three millennia ago in a land far, far away; that is, the Bible. Moore declared, in obtusely baroque verbiage, that “It’s laws of God, for He is so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual that the latter cannot be obtained but by observing the former, and if the formerly be punctually abated it cannot help but induce the latter. You can’t help but be happy if you follow God’s law and if you follow God’s law, you can’t help but be happy. We need to learn our law.”

Translation: doing what the Bible says makes you happy.

Some readers might recall Moore from 2003, when he fought a federal injunction ordering him to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments he had arranged to be erected within the Alabama Judicial Building in Montgomery. Denouncing federal judges who held that the “obedience of a court order [is] superior to all other concerns, even the suppression of belief in the sovereignty of God,” Moore refused to comply, and was sacked from the court. Thousands of his supporters descended on the site. More than a year passed before the authorities managed to truck away the offending chunk of granite, a monstrosity so heavy it threatened to crash through the building’s floor.

A decade later, already a folk hero to the brute masses of his state afflicted with the malady of faith, Moore, as unrepentant as ever, found himself reelected to Alabama’s highest tribunal. Once again, he could not sit still. When the Supreme Court in Washington legalized same-sex marriage in Alabama last January, Roy forbade state employees and probate judges from carrying out such unions. In a contentious interview with CNN, Moore then proclaimed that “Our rights contained in the Bill of Rights do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.” He denied he was defying the Supreme Court; rather, he was protecting marriage, “an institution ordained of God.” His allegiance, as should now be clear, is not to the Constitution he has sworn to uphold, but to gobbledygook myths and a bogus Tyrant in the Sky. In other words, to the Bible and God.

One might be tempted to dismiss Moore as yet another faith-mongering, red-state ignoramus, but his status as chief justice should give us pause. Moreover, for decades now, those of the religious right have been laboring to force their superstitions, by hook or by crook, on the rest of us. In far too many states, for example, they’ve succeeded in legislatively thwarting Roe v. Wade to restrict women’s reproductive rights. Just last year, they won a Supreme Court case legalizing prayer in town meetings . And if non-belief is steadily gaining ground, those who remain Christian are increasingly evangelical — which is to say, politically active and well-funded. We thus find our cherished secularism under credible, and growing, threat.