Today, voters in Alabama will go to the polls to elect the Senator who will replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who resigned earlier this year to become the Attorney General. The candidates are Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore.
Jones is a former U.S. Attorney who is most famous for having prosecuted two of the four Ku Klux Klan members who, on September 15, 1963, bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls and injuring 22 other people. (A third was convicted in 1977, and the fourth died in 1994.) Jones is a standard-issue moderate Alabama Democrat.
Moore is a twice-former Alabama Supreme Court justice. For more than two decades, Moore has been a darling of the radical Right, primarily because of his positions on abortion, the Ten Commandments, and other dog-whistle issues that have made him a politically popular public figure in Alabama. He became the Republican nominee in a recent primary, besting the incumbent appointee, Luther Strange, in a runoff despite Strange's receiving the endorsement of President Buffoon* for the nomination.
* - As a reminder, I do not use the name of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in this blog or elsewhere.
This race has attracted a great deal of attention because nine women have publicly accused Moore of having pursued sexual relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s, in the 1970s and early 1980s. One woman, Leigh Corfman, accused Moore of having sexually assaulted her when she was just 14 years old. As those claims were investigated, it became known that Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall in his hometown, Gadsden, Ala., in the early 1980s because he was repeatedly hitting on teenage girls there.
Now, you might expect that an election in which one of the candidates was credibly accused of being an aggressive pedophile would not be a close one. But this is Alabama. Recent polls show that most conservative Alabamans don't believe the allegations against Moore, despite his essentially having acknowledged that he liked to date very young girls at that time. Those who do believe them have, in some cases, suggested that there was nothing particularly inappropriate about the practice. (The age of consent in Alabama is 16.) One man who participated in a focus group run by Republican pollster Frank Luntz bragged that his grandmother was married at 13 and "had two kids and a job at 15." Many conservative Alabamans believe that Moore's accusers are being paid to make up stories about him.
It is an unfortunate fact of electoral life that white evangelical voters, who make up a substantial portion of the Alabama electorate, care primarily about one issue. That issue, of course, is abortion. Doug Jones thinks that the abortion laws ought to stay exactly as they are. He has been (falsely) accused of supporting the right to choose an abortion up to the moment of birth. Moore, by contrast, is an anti-abortion extremist. I have been unable to ascertain whether there are any circumstances under which he would think an abortion should be legal. (Presumably he believes that if you rape a 14-year-old girl and she gets pregnant, abortion should be an option as long as you can afford to pay for it. But I don't think he would say so publicly.)
So, for that reason, I fully expect the returns on Tuesday night to show Moore winning a close election.
Which is a shame, because—apart from his being a probable pedophile who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl he encountered because she was involved in a custody situation—he's a genuinely terrible human being.
We can have political disputes about all manner of issues. I am unapologetically liberal on most issues, but I believe that you can take conservative positions on issues and not be a terrible human being. Still, there are some things about which there can be no legitimate debate. One of those things is the rule of law. There have been many Supreme Court decisions with which I have disagreed, but if I were responsible for enforcing those decisions, I would do so, because we must all submit to the law as it stands, and the Supreme Court decides where the law stands unless, and until, their opinion is superseded by a Constitutional amendment. This is how our system works.
But Roy Moore obviously doesn't believe in the rule of law, and that makes him a terrible lawyer, a terrible judge, and a terrible human being—and it will make him a terrible Senator as well.
In 2001, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Moore, then chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, seeking the removal of an outsize marble monument to the Ten Commandments that Moore had ordered placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building. After a 2002 trial, a federal judge ordered Moore to remove the monument. Moore appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the lower court's decision. Moore refused to comply. Only after the district judge threatened the State of Alabama with a $5,000-per-day fine for contempt of court did the other 8 members of the Alabama Supreme Court vote to overrule Moore's order. Moore was removed from the bench by a special court that polices the Alabama judiciary.
Voters returned him to the Alabama Supreme Court in 2013, just as the U.S. Supreme Court was taking up the marriage equality cases. After Obergefell v. Hodges was decided, making marriage equality the law of the land everywhere in the U.S., Moore issued an order directing all of the state's probate judges to continue to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In response, in May 2016, the Alabama Court of the Judiciary issued an order suspending Moore from hearing cases, the first step toward his removal. Moore appealed the order, but lost, then resigned earlier this year to campaign for the Senate seat he now seeks.
There is a long history of civil disobedience in Alabama. Some of the great and courageous acts of civil disobedience happened there. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote one of the great pieces of protest literature, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," from there. Perhaps his most famous line from that document was "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
But when a person is an elected official, such as Moore was when he defied a court order to remove the Ten Commandments monument, and such as Moore was again when he defied the Supreme Court's holding that bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, that person owes an obligation to respect the rule of law. An elected official who ignores the law creates injustice on two counts: first, by holding himself and his political views above the law, and second, by creating disrespect for the law among his constituents. Elected officials are constrained to work for reform within the system; if they cannot do so, they must exit the system.
I cannot imagine that Roy Moore, when he was a judge, would be sympathetic to anyone who displayed contempt for his authority or orders. But he expected sympathy for his contempt of other courts. That's just garden-variety hypocrisy.
As I said above, I expect that Moore will win this election. And that's a shame.
No comments:
Post a Comment