With a Rebel Yell She Cried

Shaltnotback Saturday takes this last opportunity before the special election in Alabama to rehash the three four* cartoons I've drawn about the Republican standard bearer in the race. Alabama voters will go to the polls this a week from Tuesday to elect someone to complete Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's term in the U.S. Senate. The odds-on favorite according to the latest polls? Moore, Moore, Moore.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore made himself a cause celèbre in 2001 by unilaterally installing a 5,200-lb. granite monument of the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in the lobby of the state judicial building. He sparked a reprise of the lawsuits and countersuits sparked after he had mounted a wooden version of the Decalogue in his Etowah County courtroom in 1992, but this time it ended with his fellow justices removing the monument when he refused a federal court order to do so.

A judicial panel then removed Moore himself from the Court, but Alabama's voters returned him to the seat in 2012.

I occasionally get push-back from right-wing Christian evangelicals who object when I refer to the politicians who push their agenda as "theocrats." When it comes to the theocratic agenda, Judge Roy Moore is the case in point.

Having sworn to uphold the law, he nevertheless insisted upon being a law unto himself after the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges established marriage equality as the law of the land. He instructed Alabama officials to openly defy the Supreme Court decision and to deny equal rights to Alabama's LGBTQ citizens. The U.S. Constitution be damned, he declared; it's the Book of Leviticus that is the supreme law of the land.

* I had forgotten about this one!

And for the second time, the judicial panel removed him from the State Supreme Court.

For all his posturing as a paragon of Biblical morality, accounts of Judge Moore having been a creepy guy hanging around the mall angling to pick up teenage girls began to came to light last month:

His hardened core of supporters includes a number of prominent "Evangelical Christians" and their fiercely loyal flock; given their support of the Pussy-Grabber in Chief, why wouldn't they be equally eager to overlook Moore's prurient interest in pubescent girls? When you're a Republican, they let you do anything.

The other day, I read a comment on GoComics trying to cast this as a Democratic scandal, because Moore "was a DEMOCRAT when all the incidents are supposed to have happened" — a variation on the drivel blaming Democrats for racism because way back in great-great-grandpappy's day, all the racists were Democrats. (Left unsaid is that the racists have since found the Republican party more hospitable to them. If the Democrats drive Al Franken and John Conyers out, perhaps sex offenders will follow the racists to the party of Trump and Moore.)

Meanwhile, Moore's Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, prosecuted the men who bombed the two surviving perpetrators of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which you might think would give him some credibility as a defender of Christianity. But no.

I guess they can't forgive Jones for also coordinating the state and federal task force tracking down and prosecuting Eric Rudolph for a string of bombings 20 years ago, including the 1998 attack on Birmingham's New Woman All Women Health Care Center, killing a police officer and critically injuring a nurse.

It was an abortion clinic, after all.

Perhaps you remember Mr. Rudolph, a radical Christian terrorist whose other targets included LGBTQ bars and the 1996 Olympics.

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With December 7 coming up this week, I would be remiss if I failed to take note of this Day That Will Live In Infamy:

100 years ago this Thursday, the United States, citing "repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States," declared war on Austria-Hungary. Unlike the European powers, whose treaties bound them to declare war on each other like a room full of tripping mousetraps, the U.S. had up to this point been at war only with Germany.

The House passed President Wilson's declaration of war against the Hapsburg Empire by a vote of 365 to 1, the lone dissenting vote being cast by Rep. Meyer London (Socialist-NY). The Senate approved the measure unanimously (Sen. Robert LaFollette, Progressive-WI, being intentionally absent).

The declaration enabled American soldiers to come to the aid of Italy in its fight against the Central Powers. 5,000 members of the 332nd Infantry would fight alongside Italian troops in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in the fall of 1918.

"The Avalanche" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Star, December, 1917