Moore defiance is new chapter in long history
GADSDEN, Ala. — It was 1982, and four circuit judges from rural Etowah County, Ala., had filed a state bar complaint against a lawyer named Roy Moore, accusing him of running “slanderous” political ads that had portrayed the local legal system as corrupt.
The response from the 35-year-old Moore, who had just lost his own effort to win a judgeship, was infused with the kind of crusading righteousness — his critics would call it sanctimony — that would later fuel his rise to national fame.
“If the judges of Etowah County are personally offended, that is their problem, not mine,” he declared in a letter addressing the judges’ complaint. Moore added a line from Proverbs: “The guilty flee when no man pursueth.”
Today, rather than flee, or at least quit his race for the Senate, as many are demanding, Moore is declaring his innocence and charging ahead despite allegations of improper sexual behavior.
The current furor, in which numerous women have come forward alleging that he approached, dated, or in some cases sexually assaulted them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, has played out like a concentrated version of Moore’s combative history, in which he rose to national prominence as an unyielding spokesman for conservative and religious values.
Moore, a Republican, has responded with the same defiance that he exhibited when he was twice removed from his post as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, first for dismissing a federal court order to remove a 5,280-pound granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and later for flouting the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision affirming same-sex marriage. For good measure, he has declared that homosexuality should be illegal, and that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress.