Q Toon: Ten Moore Commandments

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. “Ginny” Granade ruled that Alabama's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Alabama's chief justice, Roy Moore, responded by instructing his state's judges and civic officials that they were to ignore the federal ruling. Moore's theory is that federal courts "lack authority" to rule on state laws.

In a later interview, he went so far as to pledge to defy the U.S. Supreme Court if it should rule in favor of marriage equality this year:

“This power over marriage, which came from God under our organic law, is not to be redefined by the United States Supreme Court or any federal court,” Justice Moore told “Fox News Sunday.” ... “I would not be bound thereby.”

As I noted Tuesday, Moore came to national attention by insisting upon erecting a graven image of the Ten Commandments at the Alabama Judicial Building; so that's where I went for this week's cartoon:

Q Syndicate✒Feb 19, 2015

The man has been on a lifelong moral crusade to establish a Christian caliphate. In his 1999 campaign for the Chief Justiceship, he charged that the decline of Christianist hegemony

"corresponded directly with school violence, homosexuality, and crime." His message was identical to the one in his previous race: "We must return God to our public life and restore the moral foundation of our law."

Notice how homosexuality is lumped in there between school violence and crime?

Moore's antigay animus returned to the fore in D.H. v. H.H., a custody dispute before his court in 2002. A divorced lesbian had sued for custody of her children, alleging abuse by her ex-husband. A circuit court in Alabama had ruled in favor of the father, but the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals overturned that verdict 4-1, finding that substantial evidence existed of abusive behavior by the father.

But as far as Moore was concerned, the abusive father's behavior was nothing compared to that of the sinful lesbian mother:

"Homosexual behavior is a ground for divorce, an act of sexual misconduct punishable as a crime in Alabama, a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it. That is enough under the law to allow a court to consider such activity harmful to a child. To declare that homosexuality is harmful is not to make new law but to reaffirm the old; to say that it is not harmful is to experiment with people's lives, particularly the lives of children."

One can only hope, thirteen years later, that Moore's little experiment in seeing whether those children would fare well under the roof of that abusive father was not as harmful as any sane person would expect it to be.

And that even Alabama can evolve into a civilized society in which it is the abusive father, not the lesbian mother, whose behavior is considered "an inherent evil, ... so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it."