IN THE anteroom of Roy Moore’s office hangs a large photograph of the granite slab that once cost him his job. The picture is one of the room’s three depictions of the Ten Commandments, which also include a pair of wooden tablets carved by Mr Moore himself. Those caused a kerfuffle when he was a circuit-court judge in the 1990s—a warm-up for the row in which a federal court ruled that the monument in the photo violated the constitution, Mr Moore refused to remove it from the rotunda of Alabama’s judicial building, and, in 2003, was ousted as the state’s chief justice. The religious memorabilia are now more discreet, but Mr Moore, reinstated in 2012, is not. He has picked a fight over an issue that has assumed apocalyptic proportions for many devout Americans: gay marriage.

On January 6th he instructed Alabama’s probate judges, responsible for issuing marriage licences, not to grant them to same-sex couples. He argues that a prohibition of the Alabama Supreme Court last year remains in effect—despite the subsequent judgment of the federal Supreme Court, in a case technically involving four other states but universally seen as definitive, and indeed an order of a federal district court regarding Alabama itself. Under a principle of state autonomy Mr Moore calls “parallelism”, he says only a further decision of the Alabama Supreme Court, over which he presides, or a judgment of the national one directly pertaining to Alabama, can reverse the previous ruling.

Naturally, Mr Moore—who sports miniature crucifixes on his lapel and signet ring—cannot speculate about his court’s eventual response. In the past, though, he has described homosexuality as an “inherent evil”; referring to a 19th-century judge, he reiterates his view that gay marriage means the “destruction of the foundation of our country”. He will vouchsafe that sometimes—as in the case of Dred Scott, a slave whose petition for freedom it denied—America’s Supreme Court mistakenly deviates from the constitution.

Although most of Alabama’s probate judges ignored his manoeuvre, it “caused a great deal of confusion”, says one. For Richard Cohen of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an advocacy group, this was another fireable offence. Mr Cohen—who coined Mr Moore’s sobriquet, the Ayatollah of Alabama—reckons that, whereas over the monument Mr Moore merely defied a federal court himself, now he has suborned others to do so as well. His reasoning, says Mr Cohen, is “completely deceptive and legally bogus”. “When you stand up for the truth these days,” comments Mr Moore, “you are going to be attacked.”

Perhaps he will be defenestrated again. But the real question about Mr Moore is not whether he will get the boot; nor if, morally or legally, he is right about gay marriage, or can stave it off. It is whether, in modern America, he is quite the outlandish gargoyle that his critics suggest.

O Captain! My Captain!

The son of an itinerant construction worker, he grew up in poverty but made it to West Point, the elite military academy: he insists the portrait of Jefferson Davis, and busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which also decorate his office are tributes to fellow West Pointers rather than to the Confederacy. As a disciplinarian military policeman in Vietnam, he was known as “Captain America” and feared a fragging (ie, being killed by his compatriots). Later he had stints on an Australian cattle station and as a professional kickboxer.

Military service, self-improvement, faith: Mr Moore’s is an all-American résumé. He is representative in a more literal way, too. He has twice run unsuccessfully in the Republican primary for Alabama’s governor; he is uncharacteristically coy about whether he might try again (“Who knows what I will do in the future?”). In the past he dabbled with a presidential bid, but, he says, didn’t have the money to compete. Nevertheless, he has twice been elected as chief justice, on the second occasion after being forcibly ejected. And while he insists that his opinions are based on law, not popular approval, they undeniably reflect many Alabamians’ views. In a state referendum in 2006, 81% voted to preserve the heterosexual definition of marriage.

It isn’t just Alabama: Mr Moore’s preoccupations have increasingly become the nation’s, as a glance at the Republican presidential contest attests. His principle of “parallelism”, flimsy as it sounds, is an extreme version of the concern for states’ rights, and claims of overreach by federal authorities, to which many candidates subscribe. They in turn reflect the tensions of an ever more fissiparous nation, including over another of his bugbears: government’s proper relationship with God.

America, he contends, was founded on “the God of the holy scriptures”. The theocratic implication is that non-Christians live and worship there on sufferance; indeed, Mr Moore has questioned whether Muslims should serve in Congress, since the constitutional protection of freedom of worship “conflicts with Islamic doctrine”. Again, that doubt has been echoed by leading Republicans. Lots of ordinary Americans agree that social change, such as recognition of gay marriage, “is not to be dictated by a court”, and that judges have sometimes “usurped the role of the legislature”. Many agree, too, that the religious freedom of Christians is imperilled—a liberty, Mr Moore says, invoking Thomas Jefferson, granted by God, not government.

The writings of the Founding Fathers are among those Mr Moore likes to recite, by heart and at length. He celebrates—and mourns—the virtues and values of George Washington and his peers in the poetry he has composed, too: “I’m glad they’re not here with us to see the mess we’re in/ How we’ve given up our righteousness for a life of indulgent sin.” Those lines capture his underlying lament: for America’s moral decline. When pressed, he concedes that the abolition of slavery was a wrinkle in this narrative, but maintains that people can instead be slaves to poverty or tyranny.

That is a remarkable stance for an official whose building in Montgomery is across the road from a church once led by Martin Luther King. But such nostalgia is hardly unusual. More Americans may yearn for the 1950s than for the 1770s, but the belief that the country’s precepts have been forsaken, and its greatness lost, is widespread, powerful and poisonous. A gargoyle he may be, but Mr Moore is made up of recognisable parts.