Statement by Annie Laurie Gaylor
Co-President
Freedom From Religion Foundation
More than five decades after Alabama Governor George Wallace infamously blocked the schoolhouse door in 1963 to prevent black children from entering, infamous Alabama Chief Justice (or should we make that Chief Pastor?) Roy Moore is trying to block the courthouse door to same-sex couples seeking to marry.
In January, Alabama became the 37th state in which same-sex couples may marry, following the ruling of U.S. District Judge Callie Granade. Granade struck down bans both in the Alabama statutes and the state constitution. Granade had put her order on hold until yesterday.
Moore’s interference came in the form of an order on Sunday to Alabama’s probate judges not to comply with the ruling, throwing Alabama’s courts into mass confusion. Fortunately, some probate courts have ignored Moore’s order.
Moore, an evangelical Christian fanatic, is ineducable. He previously defied a federal court order to remove a 5,000-pound, washing-machine sized Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court, which he plopped there in the dead of night. For defying an order of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Moore was removed as chief justice by a state ethics panel in 2003.
Nevertheless, Moore was voted back as chief justice in 2012 — as good an argument as one can find for why state supreme court justices should not be elected.
His defiance once again is motivated by his faith, and his blinkered belief that he has the right to inflict his religion by law on everyone else. Just like segregationists, Moore makes a “states right” argument.
And, of course, yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court itself rejected Alabama’s plea to put same-sex marriages on hold until the high court itself resolves the issue later this year. Devoutly Roman Catholic Justice Antonin Scalia made a bitter, noncollegial dissent, raging over the fact that the court’s decision not to get involved signals it will indeed legalize same-sex marriage nationwide in its pending case.
And won’t that be welcome? Civil rights do not and must not depend on the state you happen to live in.
Moore is an old nemesis of FFRF. FFRF’s Alabama chapter, the Alabama Freethought Society, and several of its members, first blew the whistle on Moore when he was a county judge in Gadsden, forcing jurors to pray and subjecting them to view his handcrafted wooden Ten Commandments plaque. Chapter members were the plaintiffs in the initial suit against Moore. Like a bad penny, he resurfaces, and regularly files briefs on behalf of his Foundation for Moral Law against FFRF and other separationist groups. But once again, Moore seems to have overplayed his hand.
Scalia and Moore make ‘a lovely couple’. . . of troglodyte twins.
