In addition to stalking teenage girls at the local mall, ringing them up at school to press them for dates, and attacking them in his car, 70-year-old Roy Moore has a long history of egregious and sometimes unconstitutional behavior that has made the Republican one of the right-wing’s poster boys in America’s culture war and simultaneously cost him high posts in the state judiciary, including removal in 2003 and again in 2016 as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
That second removal came about because he directed probate judges in the state to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled marriage equality to be the law of the land.
His hatred for LGBTQ people extends to calling gayness “an inherent evil” and saying “homosexual conduct should be illegal,” another point of view that was belatedly knocked down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas. In a 2005 interview with Bill Press, he compared gay sex with bestiality. Three years ago, he wrote letters to all the state governors urging them to hold a constitutional convention to ban marriage equality. He has said “transgenders don’t have rights.”
His homophobia has naturally been greeted with fear, sadness, and anger among LGBTQ people and extended applause from the haters and Bible-thumpers who either ignore his sexually predatory behavior with high school girls half his age or see absolutely nothing out of bounds about it. Come the special election next month, he can expect them to cast their ballot for him instead of Democrat Doug Jones even as ever more Republicans call on him to abandon his campaign that a recent poll said he is on a trajectory to lose.
At a news conference Thursday, an unbending Moore stood with his homophobic allies. Steve Peoples at the Associated Press reports:
Flanked by a huge sign for Moore’s Senate campaign, one supporter railed against the “LGBT mafia” and “homosexualist gay terrorism.” Another warned that “homosexual sodomy” destroys those who participate in it and the nations that allow it. And still another described same-sex marriage as “a mirage” because “it’s phony and fake.” [...]
Another Moore supporter, Texas Christian activist Steven Hotze, warned in 2015 that children would be “encouraged to practice sodomy in kindergarten” as a result of same-sex marriage. On Thursday, Hotze refused to describe the union of two gay people as marriage: “It’s ‘mirage’ because it’s just like a mirage — it’s phony and it’s fake.”
North Carolina-based Christian activist Flip Benham last year warned in a Charlotte City Council meeting that the policies that protect the civil rights of transgender people would trigger “bloodshed coursing down the corners of our streets.”
It’s instructive to see the appeal to family values that these extremist “Christians” employ in their assaults on the human and civil rights of LGBTQs, while condoning (either by their silence or active endorsement) a rancid “boys will be boys” attitude regarding a thirtysomething’s relentless attempts to have sex with an array of teenaged girls, including at least one well below the age of consent.
Proof once again, though we needed none, that bigots and hypocrites of a feather stick together.