Alabamians cool with anti-gay Islamophobe
Controversial GOP candidate a former judge twice booted from state’s Supreme Court
WASHINGTON— The man very likely to be the next U.S. senator is so anti-gay he thinks homosexuality should be made illegal, so anti-Muslim he thinks believers should be barred from Congress, so hostile to the rule of law he was twice kicked off Alabama’s Supreme Court for defying the rulings of other courts.
How the heck did Roy Moore, the nationally notorious “Ten Commandments judge,” win a statewide Republican primary on Tuesday even though the beloved-by-Republicans president endorsed his opponent?
Lots of factors were at play. Above all, there is this: A whole lot of Republicans agree with him.
“I don’t know anything he stands for that I’m not for. I’m anti-Muslim too,” said Gary Head, 65, a real estate broker and the Republican chairman in Russell County. As for Moore’s desire to prohibit homosexuality, Head said, “My old saying is God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
“He is very effective, very down to earth, and he is very religious. And I’d like to feel I’m the same way,” said Bob Baccus, 69, a member of the Republican committee in Madison County. He insisted that devout Muslims “want you and me dead,” and said that, in his church, “we don’t have any kind of creed, man-made laws or anything else other than what’s in the Bible.”
Such sentiments helped Moore defeat interim senator and former Alabama attorney general Luther Strange, 55 per cent to 45 per cent, despite Trump’s pleas on behalf of the man he nicknamed “Big Luther.”
The preferred media euphemism for Moore is “evangelical firebrand.” If Moore prevails in the December general election against Democratic former U.S. attorney Doug Jones, he will become by far the most fanatical member of a caucus that has already shifted markedly to the right in the past eight years — well further out than even hard-right Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the former senator whose vacancy they are vying to fill.
Moore’s primary victory is another indication of the prevalence of bigotry in a Trump-era Republican Party whose voters and leaders are comfortable with hostility toward racial and religious minority groups, Muslims perhaps above all others.
Senior party officials who preferred Strange, including Vice-President Mike Pence, rushed to embrace Moore on Tuesday night, showing none of the hesitancy that has marked the public approach to controversial candidates in the past.
“Congratulations Roy Moore! We are thrilled you ran on the #MAGA (Make America Great Again) agenda & we are for you!” Pence wrote on Twitter.
Alabama’s gay and Muslim communities were prepared for a Moore triumph.
They watched him get elected as the state’s chief justice in 2013 even though he had been kicked out of the same job a decade earlier for defying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the court building.
“There is a movement in this country, hopefully a minority, that is going on to make this a Christian theological state. I call them American Talibans,” said Ashfaq Taufique, 67, president of the Birmingham Islamic Society. “They continue to challenge the secularity of this country and impose their moral values on the rest of the system, in the legislative branch and also the judicial branch.”
Taufique continued: “Mr. Moore has said in the past that Islam is a ‘fake religion,’ and he has talked about sharia law. I have no idea what he is talking about. But he wants to implement his own sharia.”
Moore has declared that God’s law should prevail over U.S. law. In 2006, he urged Congress to impose an unconstitutional religious test for office, saying Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, should be barred from taking his seat. In 2016, after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, Moore was again turfed from the bench for ordering state judges not to issue marriage licences to gay couples.
His popularity among conservatives does not even appear to have been affected by his repeated insistence that the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among various other disasters and social problems, were divine punishment for America’s growing godlessness.
“There’s kind of a hopelessness around the issue of Roy Moore, especially with progressives and LGBT people,” said Brit Blalock, 31, a gay activist and copywriter in Birmingham. “We’re hoping that the extremeness of Roy Moore will potentially give us a shot at a progressive victory. Although we live very realistically down here. It’s a constant struggle of one step forward, two steps back.”
It is possible that Moore’s victory in one of the most conservative U.S. states says little about the rest of the country. But party figures of all stripes saw the outcome as another warning shot from a frustrated party base to the party establishment, a discontent that could prompt a wave of far-right primary challenges to Republican incumbents and depress party turnout in the 2018 general election.
Strange was the clear choice of the party elite, backed by wads of cash from allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Like Trump, many Republican voters have grown frustrated with congressional Republicans, McConnell above all others, for their failure to keep legislative promises like repealing Obamacare.
Though Strange has been in Washington less than a year, he was successfully branded as an insider. There was widespread disenchantment with the way he got the seat in the first place: an appointment from scandal-plagued now-former governor Roy Bentley, whom Strange’s office was tasked with investigating. Moore was backed by former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, a fellow Islamophobe and rabble-rouser.
Bannon has threatened to wage a national campaign to oust Republicans insufficiently committed to Trump’s agenda.