America’s most anti-gay judge will run for the U.S. Senate

Ian Millhiser Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst, Think Progress

Roy Moore, the twice-disgraced former Chief Justice of Alabama, wants to bring his unique brand of religious defiance of the law to the United States Senate. Moore announced Wednesday that he will seek the Senate seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions — and currently held by Moore’s fellow Republican, Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL).

Moore also submitted papers to resign from the state supreme court, although this resignation is largely a formality. Last September, Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary suspended Moore without pay after Moore instructed the state’s probate judges to defy a United States Supreme Court decision holding that same-sex couples may wed.

In one judicial opinion, Moore wrote that the justices who joined the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges “‘exceed the commission from which they derive their authority’ and are ‘tyrants.’” And that, “by submitting to that illegitimate authority, the people, as Madison stated, become slaves.”

Moore’s 2016 suspension was the second time he was stripped of his duties as the state’s chief justice. In 2003, the Court of the Judiciary outright removed Moore from office (Moore was later reelected to the post) after he refused to obey a federal court order requiring him to remove an unconstitutional Ten Commandments monument Moore installed in the state’s judicial building.

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This has been reposted from ThinkProgress.

Ian Millhiser is a Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Editor of ThinkProgress Justice. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Kenyon College and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Duke University. Ian clerked for Judge Eric L. Clay of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and has worked as an attorney with the National Senior Citizens Law Center’s Federal Rights Project, as Assistant Director for Communications with the American Constitution Society, and as a Teach For America teacher in the Mississippi Delta. His writings have appeared in a diversity of legal and mainstream publications, including the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, U.S. News and World Report, Slate, the Guardian, the American Prospect, the Yale Law and Policy Review and the Duke Law Journal; and he has been a guest on CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Fox News and many radio shows.

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