THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
'So Help Me God'
The "Ten Commandments Judge" battles to become Alabama's governor.
MONTGOMERY, Ala.--Most politicians would kill for--or spend millions of dollars to acquire--the name recognition Roy Moore has in Alabama. Not necessarily the kind of name recognition, mind you. Just the level.
That's because here, and across the country, he's known not just as Roy Moore, but as "Roy Moore, Ten Commandments Judge"--the Southern Baptist-cum-chief justice of Alabama who defied a federal court order to remove his 2 1/2-ton monument to the Commandments from the state courthouse, and lost his job as a result. It's a moniker that wins him automatic support in some quarters, and deafens ears before he even opens his mouth in others. And as he runs for the Republican nomination for governor in his native state, that notoriety is both a blessing and a curse.
Roy Moore makes no apologies. "I'm not trying to dodge or get away from my past," he tells me over lunch at a Montgomery seafood restaurant. "I think what we stand for in this state is exactly what our motto is: 'We dare defend our rights.' And Alabamians have always dared defend our rights, whether it be Martin Luther King, or what I did, or the beginning of the Civil War. We dare defend our rights."
At the same time as he makes this boast, there's no doubting that much of his campaign is devoted to explaining his past and persuading voters to look beyond it. "You've got to understand what the issue was with the Ten Commandments monument," he says. "And that is the message that must be gotten out first, to open the eyes and the ears of the people to understand that I do have more than that. It was more about principle than politics. . . .
"When they don't understand that it wasn't about a monument, or the Ten Commandments, or disobedience of a federal court order, but about obedience to the U.S. Constitution and the acknowledgment of God which cannot be prohibited by any authority, then when you get that message out, you can go to the platform, [and] they start to see that."
Mr. Moore referred to the "acknowledgment of God" so many times during his 2003 battle to keep the monument (and himself) in the courthouse that reporters covering the months-long saga wished they had a keystroke for the phrase. As he tells it, it's his way of describing the many nods to the Almighty made by public officials: the invocation, "God save the United States of America and this honorable court," that opens sessions of the Supreme Court; the phrase, "so help me God," that concludes many an oath of office, from the president on down; the references in the Declaration of Independence to "Nature's God," the "Creator"; the fact that religious freedom is the first right mentioned in the Bill of Rights. And, he argues, it includes postings of the Ten Commandments in courthouses--from small plaques like the wooden one he carved and hung in his Etowah County courtroom a decade ago, to the washing-machine-sized granite marker he installed in the state courthouse.
"Every function of government is related" to the acknowledgment of God, he says. "For example, an understanding of God leads to an understanding of the fallen nature of man, which leads to the separation of powers, checks and balances. . . . Then you understand why judges can't make law, and legislators can't enforce law, and the executives can't put themselves above the law."
But putting himself above the law is exactly what Mr. Moore was accused of doing. His refusal to remove the tablet from the state courthouse--a U.S. district judge had ruled that it was an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by government--drew hundreds of supporters from across the country to camp out on the building's steps for over a week in the dog days of August. They organized food deliveries and threatened to form a blockade if anyone tried to remove the stone. Critics, from the ACLU to atheist groups, also gathered to voice their opposition.
Even for Alabama, which has seen its share of political stagecraft over the years, it was a surreal sight. After all, George C. Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" to protest the integration of the University of Alabama ended with his stepping aside to allow two black students to enroll. Eventually, the state Supreme Court's eight associate justices had "Roy's Rock" rolled away with little incident. Three months later, a special panel of retired judges voted to expel Mr. Moore from office.
So it's no wonder that this yarn is what people remember about Roy Moore, and not his platform, which lists four topics--Legislative Reform, Education, Taxation and Wasteful Spending, and Illegal Aliens--ahead of Morality. Money has been a critical issue for Mr. Moore, who has been out-fundraised by his opponent in the June 6 GOP primary, the incumbent Bob Riley, by more than 4 to 1. The Moore campaign ran its first TV commercial in mid-May; Gov. Riley has been ruling the airwaves since January.
"Our problem has been reaching great multitudes of people with the message because of funding," Mr. Moore says. "And the funding has been hampered by the fact that we take no political action committee money, and the reason is because it's the very problem here in Montgomery. . . . In my opinion, [the state government] is controlled by special interests. And when it's controlled by special interests . . . you can't address the problem by taking their money."
It's to address this crucial problem, he says, that he's proposing term limits for legislators and amending the state constitution so that the legislature meets every other year instead of annually--"because, by fewer legislative sessions, you don't have as much time for the special interests to control."
In some ways, his platform could belong to just about any small-government conservative. But if you're starting to wonder what all this has to do with God, and whether Mr. Moore has lost support because he's strayed from his religious message, consider how he addresses these topics.
His arguments for limited government portray this political philosophy as the only one for those who believe in God. He quotes Jefferson: " 'Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.' Now that had a meaning back in 1700 which is true today. Tyrants are those who put [themselves] above the law of God and become all-powerful. They control everything--your life, your liberty, your pursuit of happiness. In this country, those things are given by God and government is there to secure them."
The Constitution, Mr. Moore says, was framed largely to prevent the emergence of such a godless, all-powerful tyrant. "Jefferson said, 'In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.' Which is exactly what the Constitution's about." And as for the budget deficit, Mr. Moore believes that God is on the side of lower taxes and spending: "If you know that government isn't God, then government doesn't need all the money in the world to do everything for everybody, because that's not the role" of government.
Can more than one deity, I ask, be held in official esteem in America? Not if religious tolerance is to be maintained, Mr. Moore argues: "The Judeo-Christian God is the one that gives religious liberty. The Muslim God, Allah, does not give religious liberty. If you want to prove that, go to Saudi Arabia and lift up your Bible on a street corner, and you'll find out what the Muslim God--they say--dictates.
"They dictate a form of worship through the government, and that's what their God mandates--they say. Our God does not mandate that at all. . . . Our God says that that freedom is between you and me, not you and government. That's the big difference. . . . And that's exactly why Muslims and Buddhists and others are free to worship [here] the way they want, not dictated by government."
For a man who might fairly be described as a provincial populist, Mr. Moore has a somewhat unconfined (and, in parts, exotic) past. After graduating from West Point in 1969, then-Lt. Moore served in Kansas, Germany and Vietnam. In the 1980s, he worked for a time as a cowboy on a ranch in the Australian outback. But now, he expresses disdain for much of the world beyond his own--in particular, for Europe, with its widespread secularism. "When they don't acknowledge there's a God, government is the god and controls everything.
"You don't have to know anything about history," he continues, "to go over to Europe and look at the churches. I mean, they're cold, vacant, locked museums of what used to be." The U.S. had been moving in that direction for some 60 years, he says, but in recent years has started to reverse the slide. "America's churches are alive and growing. But more than the churches, the people are coming back to a knowledge of God--and a knowledge of what the Constitution is."
Europeans likely wouldn't vote for someone as overtly religious as Mr. Moore to be dogcatcher, much less elect him to a position comparable to a U.S. governor. Yet it's beginning to look like Alabamians' sentiments toward his candidacy aren't much warmer. A May 21 poll by the Mobile Press-Register and the University of South Alabama shows Mr. Moore trailing Gov. Riley by 69% to 20% after leading the incumbent by eight points a year and a half ago. The passage of time hasn't helped. Many an observer reckons that Mr. Moore might have beaten the governor handily had the race been held in 2004, when the erstwhile judge was perhaps at his most popular and Mr. Riley was being browbeaten for a poor economy and his failed proposal to raise taxes by $1.2 billion.
Regardless of how the election turns out, Mr. Moore says he asks supporters to pray only that God's will be done. And he indicates that failing to elect faith-oriented politicians like himself won't be the end of the world for Americans: "It's good to have people in office that do understand these things, no doubt. But I think, whether they're elected or not, it's the people that are going to change it. It's from the bottom-up, not the top-down. If you go from the top-down, you're liable to put your faith in somebody that doesn't deserve it."
Mr. Wingfield, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, was a Montgomery-based reporter for the Associated Press from 2002 to 2004.
