Alabama has selected Roy Moore as its candidate for Senate a man with a laundry list of extreme, offensive beliefs and views.
An outspoken evangelical Christian who has twice lost his position as the state’s top judge, Moore, 70, won election with a fierce anti-Washington message and a call to put religion at the center of public life.
“We have to return the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to the United States Congress,” he said.
With all 67 counties reporting, Moore led rival Luther Strange by 55 percent to 45 percent.
Moore has pushed the birther movement, the conspiracy that former President Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. He says in an undated video that is reportedly from December 2016, according to The Guardian and CNN, that his “personal belief” is that Obama was not born in the U.S.
In 2008 he told World Net Daily a “major investigation” is needed to prove Obama’s authentic citizenship.
“We can survive four years of any president; we cannot survive without a Constitution,” he said at the time. “This calls for a major investigation. Our Constitution is at stake.”
Moore was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court bench on two separate occasions. Last year he was ousted permanently when he demanded judges refuse marriage licenses to gay couples. Despite the Supreme Court’s nationwide ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, Moore said the ruling did not necessarily apply to Alabama, citing “confusion and uncertainty.”
“I am not at liberty to provide any guidance to Alabama probate judges on the effect of Obergefell on the existing orders of the Alabama Supreme Court,” he wrote in a January 2016 order. “That issue remains before the entire Court which continues to deliberate on the matter.”
CNN also reported on an interview from 2005 in which Moore compared homosexuality to bestiality.
“Homosexual conduct should be illegal, yes,” he said in an interview with C-SPAN2.
“Do you know that bestiality, the relationship between man and beast is prohibited in every state” he said.
Commentator Bill Press asked Moore, “You mean homosexuality is the same thing as bestiality”
“It is a moral precept upon which this country was founded,” Moore replied.
And in 2003 he was removed from the bench for refusing to follow an order to remove a Ten Commandments statue he put in the Supreme Court building.
Moore said he was penalized because he “acknowledged God,” CNN reported at the time.
“God has chosen this time and this place so we can save our country and save our courts for our children,” he said, according to CNN.
Moore also expressed in a recent interview with the Washington Post that he does not believe in evolution. The Post reported:
“The last 50 years, Moore argued, have witnessed the tragic removal of God from public life, from schools, from government, something that was never intended under the Constitution’s establishment clause. ‘There is no such thing as evolution,’ he said at one point as he waited for his lunch. Species might adapt to their environment, he continued, but that has nothing to do with the origins of life described in the Bible. ‘That we came from a snake’ he asked rhetorically. ‘No, I don’t believe that.'”
Moore earlier this year suggested that 9/11 was an act of God punishing the U.S., according to a February video unearthed by CNN.
He referenced a quote from the Bible: “‘Because you have despised His word and trust in perverseness and oppression, and say thereon … therefore this iniquity will be to you as a breach ready to fall, swell out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instance.'”
“Sounds a little bit like the Pentagon, whose breaking came suddenly at an instance, doesn’t it” he then questioned.
“You know, we’ve suffered a lot in this country, maybe, just maybe, because we’ve distanced ourselves from the one that has it within his hands to heal this land,” he went on to say.
Moore later said the U.S. upset God because Americans “legitimize sodomy” and “legitimize abortion.”
Notably, though, not all religions are created equal, according to Moore, who this summer said Islam is a “false religion.”
“False religions like Islam are completely opposite with what our First Amendment stands for,” he said in a video posted to his Facebook page.
He also falsely reported to Vox, “There are communities under Sharia law right now in our country. Up in Illinois. … There’s Sharia law, as I understand it, in Illinois, Indiana up there. I don’t know.”
Politifact gave these remarks a “Pants on Fire” rating.
President Donald Trump had supported Strange, Moore’s rival. But Moore said he would back the president.
“Don’t let anybody in the press think that because he supported my opponent I do not support him and support his agenda,” Moore said.
Moore, meanwhile, drew support from Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson.
Bannon said Moore’s victory could embolden other grassroots challengers to try to unseat well-funded Republican incumbents in next year’s congressional elections.
“You’re going to see in state after state people that follow the model of Judge Roy Moore, that do not need to raise money from the elites,” he said at Moore’s victory party.
Reuters material contributed to this report.
