`Ten Commandments Judge’ Readies for Another Fight: With optional trims to 900 words

c. 2006 Religion News Service GALLANT, Ala. _ Covered in dirt and sawdust, Roy Moore is spending this Saturday not on the campaign trail, but restoring a dilapidated barn that will one day house a horse for his wife. Using an old bucket for a seat, Moore sits down to explain that he doesn’t really […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

GALLANT, Ala. _ Covered in dirt and sawdust, Roy Moore is spending this Saturday not on the campaign trail, but restoring a dilapidated barn that will one day house a horse for his wife.

Using an old bucket for a seat, Moore sits down to explain that he doesn’t really like politics. It’s a peculiar statement from the man who wants to be Alabama’s next governor.


What Moore says he likes is a good fight. It seems he has been fighting against one thing or another all his life.

“I am firm about my convictions in right and wrong,” Moore said.

He’s been through a sometimes-stormy legal career, defied a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building and is the underdog in a campaign to defeat Gov. Bob Riley in the June 6 Republican primary for governor. Moore’s underfunded campaign focuses on religion, no new taxes, and criticism of the status quo in the state capital of Montgomery.

“He’s always been a fighter. He stands up for what he believes. People in Alabama really like that,” said Len Gavin, a former Republican Party executive director who is volunteering for Moore.

Born in 1947, Moore sprang from the foothills of Appalachia in the northeast corner of Alabama. He grew up in a house with no indoor plumbing, worked in the school cafeteria to earn lunch money and bagged groceries to supplement his father’s income as a construction worker.

Moore graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In Vietnam, where he was a member of the 188th Military Police Company, his fellow troops called him Captain America because of his rigid adherence to military code.

“It wasn’t meant to be flattering,” Moore said.

Moore would patrol the ranks at night without a flashlight but armed with a sawed-off shotgun, searching for troops smoking marijuana or sleeping at their posts.

After Vietnam, Moore studied law at the University of Alabama. He became a deputy district attorney in 1977 and crusaded against corruption. In 1982, he lost a bitter election for circuit judge.


If Moore had a crisis of faith and confidence, he says, it happened then. There didn’t seem much for him in Alabama anymore. So in his mid-30s, he left Alabama for nearly two years.

He bummed around Texas, training as a kickboxer. Why kickboxing? “To get the anger out,” he said. He then went to work on a cattle ranch in Australia after meeting a rancher who shared his love of poetry.

Moore came home, got married and settled down to practice law. In 1992, he was appointed a circuit judge. Moore made what he said was an innocuous decision to take a wooden display of the Ten Commandments that had been hanging in his law office and put it on his courtroom wall.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to remove the plaque.

Without the controversy that followed, Moore might have remained a relatively anonymous country judge with a handmade wooden plaque on his wall. When asked if he ever thinks it’s ironic that the ACLU catapulted him to fame, he grins. “I bet they see the irony,” he said with a chuckle.

Moore parlayed that fame into his election as chief justice of Alabama in 2000, after winning the Republican primary over a better-funded candidate.

Moore’s defining moment came when he placed a 5,200-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the state judicial building. A federal judge ordered it removed. Moore refused, saying it was an unlawful order. He was removed from office.


“I find it very strange that people have such a misunderstanding of the First Amendment and the Constitution,” Moore said.

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The monument wasn’t an establishment of religion, but an “acknowledgment of God,” he said. Moore contends his removal as chief justice was unnecessary. The federal judge could have commanded someone else to remove the monument, he said.

Moore criticizes special interests, taxes, political action committees, gay marriage and what he calls the tyranny of federal judges. He also says it’s wrong for Alabama to offer driver license tests in multiple languages.

While he was chief justice, Moore wrote an opinion calling homosexuality an “inherent evil.” That comment was included in a 35-page concurring opinion in a case in which the court voted unanimously to deny a lesbian mother custody of her three children.

This year he is honorary chairman of a group seeking to amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage. That proposal will be on the June 6 ballot.

That mixture of religion and no new taxes should be a resounding Republican campaign message, according to some observers. But polls suggest Moore is badly trailing Riley. Much of Moore’s financial support has come from outside Alabama.


“We have absolutely no confidence in these polls,” Moore said.

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The people who seek him out on the campaign trail often treat him not like a candidate, but as a celebrity.

He signs autographs. A police officer shakes his hand and says, “Judge, I want you to know we’re all with you down here.” A home-schooling mom grins and poses for a picture with him.

Marty Connors, former chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, said he thinks Moore’s popularity is somewhat higher than indicated by polls that target likely Republican voters.

“Moore voters tend to be more rural, less party-identified, more ideologically identified,” Connors said.

Moore said he worked hard to commit long passages of Scripture and historical writings to memory. He has a habit of reciting them when asked about his beliefs _ a practice that results either in gazes of adoration or blank stares, depending on what the particular recipient of the soliloquy thinks of him. Friends say it’s something of a defense mechanism.

Moore said he has no plans to bring the granite monument bearing the Ten Commandments to the Alabama Capitol or any other government building if he is elected governor.

“I think people know by now how I feel about the Ten Commandments,” Moore said.


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As governor, he would be listed as a defendant on many lawsuits filed against the state. Would he defy another court order if he felt it was contrary to the Constitution? Maybe, Moore said.

“I would have to get the specific situation. But say the acknowledgment of God? I would acknowledge God,” Moore said. “The big issue in the country today is whether or not you say there is a sovereign God.”

(Kim Chandler writes for The Birmingham News in Birmingham, Ala.)

KRE/PH END CHANDLER

Editors: To obtain photos of Roy Moore, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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