FORMER JUDGE ROY MOORE IS A FRAUD AND A LIAR

…The liar, Roy Moore

 

Moore falsely believes that the founding fathers were aware of no religion other than Christianity.

 

I think it’s important that people in Alabama fully understand that their Roy Moore that is running against a Democrat for Senator of Alabama, he has been a con artist for most of his political life.  Not just about his pedophilia, but about many issues that are important to all free and religious citizens of a democratic nation.

 

How else should we look at a Mr. Moore, the former Chief Justice of the Alabama State Supreme Court, that challenged the idea of separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments Case?

 

Moore had personally installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, Alabama.  He then declared that the event marked “The restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land”.   Then Moore refused to allow any other religious representations in that same federal public space.

 

The basis of our US Constitution’s “Freedom of Religion”, is that no religious statue or icon can be allowed on federal property, unless the property is open to icons from all recognized religions.  To deal with any possible confusion about that freedom, it was decided decades ago that no religion should be represented on any US federal property.

 

Moore was subsequently removed from the Alabama Supreme Court when he refused to follow the federal court order for having the Ten Commandments statue block removed.  His bogus explanation for disobeying the court order was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, therefore, the First Amendment gave only American Christians the right to free exercise.  How’s that for unreasonable logic and the denying of historical facts?

 

Moore conveniently refused to recognize that the founding fathers had made it abundantly clear that they did recognize that there were other religions.  Also, wasn't that the reason that decades before, their ancestors had migrated to the colonies from the British Isles and Europe, just so that they could freely worship the different religions of the time without suffering retribution?

 

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was sued for so blatantly flouting the US Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about his claim that the United States was only a Christian nation.

 

This Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation.  He tries to pass himself off as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct against him, together with his many questionable statements over the years, such as that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, or that many communities in the United States are staggering under the burden of Islamic sharia law, this continues to show both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality.

 

Back in 2004, after Moore was unseated in the state court for refusing to obey the court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument.  Moore then became a touring, full-time martyr for the religious right.  In the course of his conversation with students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Moore launched into his belief of how the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else.  However, history has shown that the founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli.  That same treaty, negotiated by the President John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Aside from his boasts about his constitutional expertise, Moore also asserts that he is a Baptist.  And yes, he is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.  Once again, his behavior contradicts that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two basic characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in the separation of church and state, this belief grew out of the Baptists’ persecution as a minority religion in early America.

 

It was Mr. Roger Williams, a Puritan who fled to what is now Rhode Island where he became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America.  He also advocated for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Thomas Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same statement to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

 

For Williams, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked.  When Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close of an association with the government.

 

Baptists have patrolled their “wall of separation” between church and state for two centuries. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the US Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “pre-eminently a Baptist achievement.”

 

That washing-machine-size Ten Commandments rock that Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one even dimly aware of Baptist heritage would tolerate such blasphemy because the combination of church and state, as Williams had warned, diminishes the Baptist faith.

 

Mr. Moore as a con man is made crystal clear by the fact that he claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, evangelical Christian values. Aside from the disgusting idea of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to herald.

 

 

Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could climb the first rungs of the ladder toward social and economic stability. History has shown that these groups also worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of all workers to organize. The agenda of 19th- and early-20th-century evangelicals is nothing close to that of Moore and the religious right.

 

I will now leave it to other religious scholars to determine which version of “evangelical values” better identifies with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the strangers and care for the needy.

 

The image that Moore has tried to project over the course of his career, as a constitutional authority, a Baptist and a representative of evangelical values, are not only false, but they are a total fraud.

 

The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask Moore as the imposter he is.

 

Let’s hope that becomes the reality in the special election next month in Alabama.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017