“This is a pathetic, last-ditch attempt at judicial fiat,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director at the Human Rights Campaign, in a statement late Sunday.

A few blocks away from the State Supreme Court on Monday morning, Tori Sisson and Shanté Wolfe were preparing to step into the Montgomery County courthouse and receive their marriage license. The couple seemed too happy to be angry with Chief Justice Moore.

“Bless his heart,” Ms. Sisson said, a pronouncement that, in this part of the world, tends to transmit a mix of pity, compassion and gentle judgment. (Ms. Sisson is an Alabama-based staff member with the Human Rights Campaign).

Chief Justice Moore has long fretted that the United States is “being led to deny the existence of the Creator God,” as he put it in his 2005 autobiography, “So Help Me God.”

In the book, Chief Justice Moore recalls the day that he received Christ in a tiny Baptist church in Gallant, Ala., his hometown. In Vietnam, he wrote, he was shocked at the lack of discipline and drug use among the troops, and said he had received “several threats” from troops when he tried to stop their drug use. He restored some camaraderie, he said, by building a boxing ring — and entering it, himself.

He won all of his fights, he said.

By 1995, he was serving as a circuit judge in Etowah County, where he began his long history of tussling with civil liberties groups over placing Ten Commandments plaques in court settings. The story ended in November 2003, when a special ethics panel removed him from the chief justice post after he refused to remove the statue.

“I have absolutely no regrets,” he said after the ruling. He ran for governor twice, and failed, but in 2012, he shocked the political establishment with his re-election to the state’s high court, cashing in on name recognition and Alabama’s widespread Christian sentiment and skeptical stance toward federal government power.