
Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey made her principles — or lack thereof — appallingly clear on Friday.

Multiple allegations of molestation and sexual predation against teenagers ought to be more than enough to immediately and unequivocally drop one's endorsement of a political candidate.

But when it comes to her party's Senate nominee, Roy Moore, Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has joined the growing and despicable chorus of conservative voices for whom that is apparently not the case.

A number of women have come forward in recent weeks to accuse Moore of having pursued and assaulted them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.


But to Ivey, even the possibility of electing a Democrat to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions' former seat is a fate far worse than elevating a serial pedophile and unrepentant sexual abuser.

That's not hyperbole — on Friday, Ivey told reporters exactly that.

We need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on the things like Supreme Court justices, other appointsment that the Senate has to confirm, and make major decisions. And so um, that's — that's what I plan to do, is vote for the Republican nominee, Roy Moore.

This profile in cowardice and utter lack of a conscience does not put Ivey in a class by herself, unfortunately.

Many other Republicans — from the Alabama Republican Party, to numerous candidates in other states, to Donald Trump and his team — have all made it quite clear that they value tax cuts for the rich over victims of sexual assault.

And while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan finally came around to saying Moore ought to step down from the race, it's clear their motivation didn't come from a genuine abhorrence of sexual assault considering they're still propping up the predator in the White House.

Indeed, many Republicans are going to shockingly repugnant lengths to defend Moore and to avoid having to withdraw their support of his candidacy, lest the specter of a Democrat filling a seat in Alabama come to pass.

Ivey herself didn't even try to hide that callous motivation — and her mention of Supreme Court justices is troublingly juxtaposed with Donald Trump's seemingly random announcement of a "refreshed" list of candidates from which he would choose a nominee to fill a future vacancy, "should one arise."

The Republican Party, from the state to the federal level, is making it painfully apparent just where their values lay: with tax breaks for billionaires and the chance to apply an extremely conservative rewrite to the Constitution, not with teenage victims of a sexual predator, so long as the offender is one of their own.