Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore is, to say the least, quite the golden-boy of the dominionist and especially the Christian Reconstructionist movement--partly because of some moves he made that were as infamous as Civil Rights era governor George Wallace, and partly for the massive amounts of chest-beating he's done since when even his fellow judges got thoroughly sick of things like Moore flouting court orders.

For folks who've been out of the country, are new to the movement against dominionism, or who just want a refresher, here's some basic backgrounder on Moore.

Roy Moore started his career as a judge in 1992, being appointed by then-Gov. Guy Hunt originally to replace Circuit Court Judge Julius Swan; he was elected to keep the seat in 1994.  Before this, Moore worked the early 80's on a Australian cattle station owned by Colin Rolfe, who was an Aussie dominionist and who seems to have been particularly influential; before that, Moore was literally run out of the town of Gadsden, Alabama (where he had worked as a deputy district attorney) and investigated by the bar for "suspect conduct"--a pattern which would repeat itself throughout Moore's career.

From the moment he was appointed judge, Moore almost from the very start was working to turn his courtroom into a Christian Reconstructionist version of a sharia court.  He had a wooden Ten Commandments tablet (it should be noted this was the Protestant version) over his seat, would open court cases with Baptist invocations which were mandatory for court attendees to participate in (under pain of being held in contempt), and in a particularly infamous decision used the careers of two defendants (who happened to work as male strippers) against them.

By 1995, the ACLU had quite enough; they filed suit against Moore whereupon the state Supreme Court ordered him to remove the plaque or place it with other historical documents including the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence; he was also ordered to stop leading prayers in his courtroom.

In typical Roy Moore style, he essentially told them to die in a fire and in the first instance of a repeating pattern pulled out the "Help, Help, I'm Being Repressed!" card.  (Moore showed later his objection was to seeing the Ten Commandments in a historical context--an article in Christianity Today notes his disapproval of a later Ten Commandments display where the Protestant Decalogue is placed with historical documents such as the Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the Mayflower Compact.)

Eventually, in 1999, Moore was found to be violating ethics laws in his fundraising to keep his wooden Ten Commandments display.

Moore promptly used the brouhaha over his Ten Commandments display and courtroom prayers to run for Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice in 2000, which he won largely on an explicitly Christian Nationalist platform (he was quoted upon his swearing-in that "God's law will be publicly acknowledged in our court").  (And by far, that is NOT his only quote explicitly endorsing Christian Reconstructionism--this page has a whole mess of quotes like that.)

Things promptly went from bad to worse.  on July 31, 2001--as Roy Moore's own special way of saying "Screw you" to the courts--he placed a 2 and a half tonne monument depicting the Protestant Decalogue in the Supreme Court building's rotunda in what is probably his most infamous stunt.  The next day, he held a press conference (along with multiple representatives of dominionist groups) and had the following speech:

"Today a cry has gone out across our land for the acknowledgment of that God upon whom this nation and our laws were founded," he said, "and for those simple truths which our forefathers found to be self-evident; but once again"--here he slipped into Samuel Adams's words--"we find that those cries have fallen upon eyes that see not, ears that hear not our prayers, and hearts much like that nether millstone ... May this day mark the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land."

He made a blatantly homophobic ruling--later the subject of an ethics complaint from Lambda Legal--stating that "the [homosexual] lifestyle should never be tolerated" and that homosexuality "alone would render [a man] or [a woman] an unfit parent" in denying custody of a child to a lesbian mother.  Reportedly, he even quoted from Leviticus to justify the legal decision:

Moreover, Chief Justice Moore's concurring opinion demonstrates that he believes it appropriate to invoke religious doctrine as a basis for issuing legal decisions. Citing "direct revelation found in the Holy Scriptures," Chief Justice Moore's concurring opinion declares that homosexuality "violates both natural and revealed law." He further explains:

      The author of Genesis writes: `God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.... For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.' Genesis 1:27, 2:24 (King James). The law of the Old Testament enforced this distinction between the genders by stating that `if a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.' Leviticus 20:33 (King James)

Some of Moore's other commentary in the case is chilling:

The unanimous court wrote a brief opinion summarizing the facts of the case and issuing its opinion. Most of it is straightforward, centering on the legal standard by which custody can be reversed and explaining why the court believed the woman had not met it.

That should have been the end of the story. But, because the woman in question is a lesbian, Moore felt it necessary to write a concurring opinion laced with religiously grounded attacks on homosexuality.

Moore's gratuitous tirade is replete with passages like this: "Homosexual conduct is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this Nation and our laws are predicated."

Citing the biblical Books of Genesis and Leviticus, Moore even goes so far as to pen this chilling passage: "The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle."

Is Moore saying gay people should be executed? It sure sounds like it.

In a disturbing pattern in and of itself, almost everyone in the Alabama court system critical of Moore was afraid of speaking out against him during his rule as Chief Justice due to the legitimate fear of censure.

It was around this time, too, that Roy Moore started being the darling of the dominionist community nationwide.  The following article shows how much the dominionists rallied around Dobson in 1997:

The groups supporting Moore read like a "who's who" of the religious right. Along with Robertson and Kennedy were Robertson's legal arm, Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, American Family Association, Alabama Family Alliance (linked to values guru James Dobson of Focus on the Family) (actually a state affiliate of FotF--ed.), and the Eagle Forum. Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries raised over $100,000 for Moore's defense. In one fund raising letter, the group warned supporters: "The enemies of virtue are pulling out all the stops. We must stand firm. This battle must be fought and won -- but it will take tens of thousands of dollars."

Concerned Women for America was one of several dominionist groups who praised Moore's decision in regards to the lesbian mother who sought custody, as did the Christian Family Association,(a little-known dominionist group with ties to the Constitution Party nee US Taxpayer's Party).  Moore even got an exclusive media deal with James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, and both were promoting "stealth placement" of the Protestant Decalogue in government offices.

By October 2001 pro-civil-rights groups were already filing lawsuits.  The American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (in one of their very first cases involving dominionism) all sued to have the monument removed, stating in their joint legal brief that the monument "sends a message to all who enter the State Judicial Building that the government encourages and endorses the practice of religion in general and Judeo-Christianity in particular."

By October 28, 2002, the US District Court was hearing the case; by November 2002 District Court Judge Myron Thompson issued his ruling--which gave Roy Moore thirty days to remove aforementioned two-tonne monument or pay the piper.

Roy Moore promptly--in an act reminiscent of Gov. George Wallace's statements re segregation, he told them to pound sand and that he would not remove the monument.  (The resemblance was in fact noted quite explicitly in the court in a subsequent filing with the US Circuit Court, Glassroth vs. Moore, which upheld the original court decision.)

Moore attempted to appeal to the US Supreme Court, which was rejected; he then sat and refused to remove the monument, being fined $5000 a day under the terms of the court ruling.

Shortly after that, his fellow judges on the Supreme Court had had quite enough; in 2003 they began formal proceedings to disbar Moore, first suspending him with pay on August 23 and then in a landmark decision promptly removed Moore from office in a particularly damning court decision on November 13:

This court has found that Chief Justice Moore not only willfully and publicly defied the orders of a United States district court, but upon direct questioning by the court he also gave the court no assurances that he would follow that order or any similar order in the future. In fact, he affirmed his earlier statements in which he said he would do the same. Under these circumstances, there is no penalty short of removal from office that would resolve this issue. Anything short of removal would only serve to set up another confrontation that would ultimately bring us back to where we are today. This court unanimously concludes that Chief Justice Moore should be removed from the office of Chief Justice.

It is therefore ORDERED and ADJUDGED by the court that Roy S. Moore be, and he hereby is, removed from the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama.

Moore, from there, began a new career--as a promoter of dominionist legislation and taking his monument on tours.  He founded a group called Foundation for Moral Law which has as its explicit goal integration of Levitican law into the US legal system; he was the ghostwriter for the Constitution Restoration Act (which has been proposed in every Congressional session since 2004, and which--if ever passed--would potentially strip all legal jurisdiction for any First Amendment cases involving dominionism from the courts, on pain of formal impeachment and disbarrment for judges and attorneys who take the cases anyways--and which has substantial support from dominionists); he's given lectures on Christian Reconstructionism, and explicitly promotes this stuff at Baptist churches in his monument tours.  He's also stumped before Congress--a decision that the ADL reported as "inappropriate", especially as it was a congressional hearing on religious expression.

Needless to say, this has endeared him to dominionists even more--and also has endeared Moore to scarier folks yet.  Some of the evidence started coming out from the SPLC earlier, and by 2004 MooreWatch was reporting on Moore's links to a racist group called the League of the South.  American Atheists noted it even earlier, as far back as 2003 where literal Klansmen were rallying in support of Moore.

In one of my posts here on Talk2Action, Dominionists, Racists and Justice Sunday III, I document thoroughly Moore's links to militia and racist groups--none the least being the League of the South, but also the Council of Conservative Citizens (the modern-day "White Citizen's Councils") and to the Constitution Party (an explicitly Christian Reconstructionist political party with multiple ties to racist and militia groups).  

Quoting from that article:

Roy Moore has also been in bed with more than a few racists.  One of the groups he has done speeches for, the "Alabama Tea Party", was organised by a group that has set up a racist "Minutemen" type militia group and also included speakers from the Council of Conservative Citizens (one of whom actually tends to also speak in favour of Holocaust revisionism--the false claim that Jews and other persons either were not killed en masse by the Nazis or that the level of genocide was exaggerated).

Moore's legal adviser, Tom Parker, has links to multiple racist groups:

But Tom Parker has some other friends, too. It's just that he doesn't spend much time bragging publicly about this batch of colleagues and supporters.

In July, Parker made his way to the Selma home of Pat and Butch Godwin, who were holding a birthday party to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a wealthy slave trader who became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. (Forrest also presided over the massacre of some 250 black prisoners of war at Ft. Pillow, Tenn.) The Godwins run Friends of Forrest Inc., which owns a Forrest statue the Godwins spent two years unsuccessfully trying to place on public property.

Standing on his friends' Confederate battle flag-bedecked front porch, Parker rallied the crowd. Later, one listener lauded him as "a man not afraid of the flag."

The Godwins are tried and true neo-Confederates. Pat Godwin's latest crusade is to block any acknowledgement on the Capitol grounds of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march ý a goal of the Alabama Historical Commission. In a July E-mail, Godwin railed at "the trash that came here in 1965," complaining that those who honor the civil rights movement "are aiding and abetting the ultimate goal of the ONE WORLD ORDER ý to BROWN AmeriKa and annihilate Anglo-Celtic-European culture!"

Pat Godwin and her close friend Ellen Williams recently put together a packet of documents that they say proves that the march was the "Mother of All Orgies" and the marchers were motivated by "money, sex and alcohol."

A month earlier, in June, Parker showed up at the Elba, Ala., funeral of Alberta Stewart Martin, believed to have been the last living widow of a Confederate veteran. He made himself a quick favorite by giving away hundreds of miniature Confederate battle flags to the 300 people, many in period dress, who gathered for this major neo-Confederate event.

And, in a photo widely circulated in the neo-Confederate world, he is seen with what were apparently two friends of his: Mike Whorton, Alabama state leader of the League of the South hate group, and Leonard Wilson, a longtime segregationist who is on the national board of the Council of Conservative Citizens (see also Communing with the Council), a hate group that has described black people as "a retrograde species of humanity."

Parker, who was Moore's spokesman and legal adviser but lost that job when Moore was fired, did not return repeated telephone calls requesting comment. Pat and Butch Godwin also declined to return messages left at their home, which is known fondly in neo-Confederate circles as "Fort Dixie."

Moore himself has spoken with people in the "tax protester" movement, including "Christian Militia" groups and churches connected with the "Patriot Pastor" movement:

The appearance was hyped all week by the presence of Moore's exiled monument on a flatbed truck in the parking lot. But it was the Rev. W.N. Otwell, speaking before Moore despite recent heart surgery, who really stole the show.

Otwell, an ardent segregationist and militia supporter who heads God Said Ministries in Mount Enterprise, Texas, began his opening-night remarks by berating the women in the audience, one of them dressed as Betsy Ross, for not living a true Christian life.

Being saved doesn't make you a Christian, he told them in a voice as powerful and angry as his battered body could muster. Women were to take care of the home, raise children, and be completely subservient to their husbands, Otwell lectured.

"My wife doesn't need a head," he shouted. "I'm the head!"

His audience was with him. "Good preaching!" a man yelled as Otwell outlined a holy dress code he claims is based on Scripture. The Bible, which predates pants by several years, says a "woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man" (Deuteronomy 22:5).

The "Patriot Church" movement (which I will touch on here) isn't the only group Moore is friendly with--more than once, Moore has been noted as being courted by the Constitution Party--which has so many links to racist and militia groups that it gets its own category.

One of the groups that Moore has been particularly working with is a group called "Restore America", which is explicitly Christian Reconstructionist; Moore himself has been a perennial proposed candidate for the Constitution Party's presidential nomination, and the founder of the Constitution Party and one of the architects of the hijacking of the Republican Party, Howard Phillips III, has actively promoted a petition to get Roy Moore elected as a US Supreme Court justice.

Even some of his former followers have expressed grave fear:

The woman who filed suit to reinstate Roy Moore as Alabama's Supreme Court chief justice now fears his election as governor.

Whether Christian talk show host Kelly McGinley had a falling out with the right wing of the Republican Party or saw a vision of the future, she's saying some chilling things.

From Mobile, Ms. McGinley said Mr. Moore and his followers want to establish a theocracy, or a government by a person or persons who claims to rule with divine authority.

She said they "wish to bring a government based on Old Testament law, which would administer the death penalty for offenses ranging from homosexuality to talking back to your parents."

She says his election could trigger a major showdown between state and federal governments that could lead to violence.

She links the Republican Party, the Council for National Policy, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Masons in a web of conspiracy to impose Biblical law.

"It is too extreme for the likes of me," she said. But it may be a case of her being too extreme for Republicans, also. In 2004, the party blocked her from running for the state school board because of her on-air support for the Constitution Party, even though Mr. Moore appeared with the party's presidential candidate last year.

In May 2005, Roy Moore made a formal announcement that he was running as a Republican primary candidate--a possibility talked about as early as a few days after his booting from the Alabama Supreme Court.  This campaign may in fact have involved ethics violations--reportedly Moore was stumping for "Christmas cash" for his campaign using the "Gay Fear" ticket.  The play on fear was successful--he raised more money than any other gubernatorial candidate in the state.  This included television stumping where he promoted Christian Reconstructionism, too.

His run for the Republican nomination--not so much successful, as it turns out.  Per CNN, Gov. Riley soundly beat Roy Moore in the primary election, and per ABP News it was a rather sound defeat indeed:

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (ABP) -- In what may be the final act of the drama that has been Roy Moore's political life, the so-called "Ten Commandments Judge" went down to resounding defeat June 6 in his race for Alabama's Republican gubernatorial nomination.

One of Moore's protégés, meanwhile, also lost a race for the seat that Moore held until he was ousted from it -- chief justice of Alabama.

Moore lost to sitting Alabama Gov. Bob Riley (R) 67-33 percent, according to the Montgomery Advertiser. Meanwhile Moore's former associate, Tom Parker, lost the Republican nomination for chief justice to the incumbent, Drayton Nabers, by a 61-39 percent margin.

Both races pitted evangelical Christians against each other.

Apparently (and as the article briefly notes above) quite a number of Moore's other associates also got soundly trounced:

Parker, meanwhile, led a slate of Moore-aligned judicial candidates who were defeated by similarly wide margins. He served as a Moore staffer and as an employee of Moore's non-profit foundation before being elected to the state's high court in 2004. An active Methodist, his campaign against Nabers drew more attention than the gubernatorial race in its final days due to a level of mud-slinging unusual for an Alabama judicial election.

Both launched attacks on their opponents through the news media and in campaign ads. Parker upset many judges and other legal experts in the state by criticizing his colleagues for following a recent federal Supreme Court decision on the death penalty. Nabers countered that ignoring higher court decisions would lead to legal anarchy.

Some journalists (in what I feel, personally, is a dangerous assumption) have pondered whether Roy Moore's political career is salvagable:

More than a decade later, his fame as the "Ten Commandments Judge" would catapult him to head of the state's highest court and national notoriety. After his crushing defeat to Gov. Bob Riley in Tuesday's Republican gubernatorial primary, Moore was coy about his future.

This time, however, analysts strongly question whether he will be able to reconstruct a political career.

"I think it's going to be very hard for him to come back and be a major force in Alabama politics because he clearly lost ground among Republican primary voters," said Merle Black, an authority on Southern politics at Emory University in Atlanta.

In part, Black said, that's because Moore alienated some core supporters three years ago through his defiance of a federal court order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building. But Black also read Tuesday's returns -- in which Riley trounced Moore by a 2-1 margin -- as a sign that the Alabama Republican Party's growth is reducing the influence of small town and rural voters who are more inclined to support Moore.

Indeed, unofficial final returns show that turnout in Tuesday's GOP gubernatorial primary jumped 29 percent over four years ago. Much of the growth came from booming metro areas like Baldwin County, where Riley won by an almost 4-1 margin.

Out of 67 counties, Moore carried only 14, and several were in the rural Black Belt where Republican voters make up a tiny fraction of the electorate. Among those he lost was his home county of Etowah.

I, for one, would not count out Roy Moore (or any dominionist, for that matter--it's been the hard experience of those of us fighting dominionism that dominionist movements, like cockroaches, tend to scatter when light is shown only to regroup when there is less attention on them), but it is an encouraging sign that maybe--just maybe--the state of Alabama is FINALLY starting to get sick of the antics of the state's pet dominionists.