I know Roy Moore. He's always been a con artist.
The candidate has made a career of willfully misrepresenting the ideas he claims to stand for.
By Randall Balmer November 17 at 12:30 PM
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion and director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.
I first encountered Roy Moore in 2002 in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where I was an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case. Moore, then the state’s chief justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery, declared that the event marked “the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land” and then refused to allow any other religious representations in that public space.
“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued for so blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a Christian nation. One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.
That statement, of course, was demonstrably, ridiculously false. But that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation — as a constitutional authority, as a Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years — that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law — underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality.
In 2004, after Moore was unseated for refusing to obey a court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a kind of full-time martyr for the religious right, I visited the judge in Montgomery, together with a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of the conversation, Moore launched into his riff about how the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else. (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)
I decided to play along. By Moore’s logic, I suggested, another clause of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/roy-moore-is-a-fraud/2017/11/17/45c0edfe-caf9-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html
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