Senate candidate Roy Moore, an Alabama Republican, believes that the Constitution reflects “the sovereignty of God” and that same-sex marriage and the Senate filibuster rules do not.
“I talk to liberals, and I tell them this,” he said in a new interview with Time magazine. “I say, ‘you should be recognizing the sovereignty of God.’ That’s what gives you the right to believe what you want. That’s in the first four Commandments.”
Moore was removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to remove a monument to the 10 commandments he installed in the state courthouse and refusing to recognize the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. Last month, he won the Republican primary for a Senate seat over Luther Strange, a candidate backed by the party establishment in Washington and President Trump.
In the interview, Moore said that the most misunderstood thing about his campaign is that it’s about religion. “It’s not religious at all,” he said. “God is not religion. I believe in the sovereignty of God. It’s stated clearly in our law, clearly in our history, and clearly in our faith. It’s not anything I’m making up.”
A few highlights from the somewhat circuitous Roy Moore interview:
So you believe fundamentally that our Constitutional rights are God-given and scriptural in their context. When you’re a Senator, how is that going to manifest itself in your legislative fights? What are the issues you’re going to fight for?
If rights are given by God, then they can’t be taken away from us. That makes Obergefell [the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage] an illegitimate opinion, because it does that. Our rights are given by God.
In other words, you want to see if you can get rid of same-sex marriage.
Well… you ask me how it would affect my ruling. Justices who put themselves above the Constitution they’re sworn to uphold? They should be impeached and removed.
Moore also said that he wanted to eliminate the Senate filibuster, because it is also against God’s will. “I want to strongly oppose the 60-vote rule,” he says. “It’s a man-made thing that gets in and prevents vote on legislation. If the people down here make me Senator, they want me to rule on these things. I can’t rule on them under the current Senate rules. It relates to God because the Constitution was meant to restrain this sort of power.”
On the recent NFL take-a-knee controversy, Moore asserted that not standing for the National Anthem is against the law (it isn’t). “It was a act of Congress that every man stand and put their hand over their heart,” he said. “That’s the law. That’s in the United States Code. 36-USC-301. I back the President in upholding respect for the patriotism for our country, on two grounds. One, it’s respect for the law. If we don’t respect the law, what kind of country are we going to have? Two, it’s respect for those who have fallen and given the ultimate sacrifice. I’m surprised that no one brought this up.”
Overall, Moore’s platform is to return the country to “biblical values.” Asked by Time to describe what that would look like, he said, “If I was successful, it would look like the country we came from. The United States of America. Without the knowledge of God, there is no such thing as the United States of America, because if you take God out of it, then you take out the very values and principles on which it was founded.”
