It’s time that we discussed Roy Moore.
Moore is the Republican candidate for a United States Senate seat, formerly held by Attorney-General Jeff Sessions that will be filled in a special election on December twelfth.
Moore came by the nomination by defeating the Republican appointee in the republican primary, named Luther Strange.
I have to say that the loss of a “Senator Strange” was something of a disappointment for me.
The only consolation was that Roy Moore was even stranger.
Moore was elected twice and removed twice as the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
The first time he was removed in2003 was due to his refusal to remove a 5,280 pound granite sculpture of the Ten Commandments that he had placed in the lobby of the rotunda at the Alabama Supreme Court.
Moore sought the Republican nomination for Governor in the Republican primaries in 2006 and 2010 but was defeated both times.
He was elected Chief Justice again in 2013 but was suspended in May 2016 for ordering state probate justices not to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges upholding their right to marry.
He resigned from the Court in April 2017 in order to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sessions.
Moore is avowedly anti-Muslim, anti-Gay and has ties to neo-Confederate and white nationalist groups.
He was a proponent of the “birther” movement that President Obama was not born in this country.
He espouses the belief that Christianity supersedes public laws.
His Democratic opponent is former United States Attorney, Doug Jones, who successfully prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan members that committed the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four little girls were murdered, almost forty years after the crime was committed.
While the wisdom in making a choice in this race would seem readily apparent, until this week, Moore was winning.
That came to a halt when a woman disclosed that Moore molested her when she was fourteen and he was a thirty-four year old assistant district attorney.
Her disclosure was corroborated by family and friends to whom she confided at the time it occurred.
Several other women also disclosed that Moore tried to establish a relationship with them when they were teenagers and he was in his thirties.
Moore denies all of the allegations and claims it is a “political hit job” designed by the Clintons, the Washington Post and the Washington, D.C. establishment.
The reaction to these disclosures is, to say the least, interesting.
A number of Moore’s fellow evangelicals have compared Moore’s interests in teenage girls to Joseph and Mary.
What they seem to forget is that Jesus was the product of a virgin birth not pedophilia.
Moreover, I can’t recall anyone comparing Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky to Joseph and Mary.
Which leads us, to the issue of whether this is a political hit job orchestrated by the Clintons.
I want to say right up front that, as the father of two daughters, I have never defended, justified or tried to explain or rationalize Bill Clinton’s sexual conduct.
Call me naïve, but it would seem to me that the last thing the Clintons would want to devise is a political hit job scenario involving a public official and a young girl that would dredge up the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal again.
Nor do I see what gain there is in the Clinton’s trying to discredit Roy Moore since both are out of office and unlikely to seek office again.
The other reaction is thee repeated refrain from Moore and his defenders of “Why now?”
You would have to be living in a cave to have missed the titanic wave of accusations and disclosures about inappropriate sexual conduct, beginning with Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and, now, Al Franken, that have rocked Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and a multitude of state capitals.
As each woman has found the courage to come forward and disclose this abuse, it has clearly empowered other victims to do the same.
Roy Moore’s victims are no different.
The other observation that I can offer, after almost two decades sitting on a criminal court bench, is that women don’t fabricate these experiences.
Roy Moore’s conduct fits the same pattern as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and a certain public official whose boasts were caught on an Access Hollywood tape.
Moore has a prototype for his victims and a pattern of victimizing them that amounts to serial abuse.
Almost a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article in the American Educator entitled “Defining Deviance Down” in which he assailed the redefining of behavior, formerly considered abnormal to acceptable.
I have been heartened by the outrage almost universally expressed at the conduct of Weinstein, Cosby and their ilk but I also offer this sobering observation.
If Roy Moore is elected to the United States Senate, after we have learned what he has done, than we haven’t hit bottom yet.