Roy Moore running for governor of Alabama
By Robert Marus
Associated Baptist Press
GADSDEN, Ala. (ABP)—The “Ten
Commandments Judge” is back and is aiming for a higher Alabama
office than the one from which he was fired two years ago.
Roy Moore announced he is running for governor in his home state
of Alabama. His colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court removed
Moore from his job as chief justice in 2003, after he openly defied
a succession of federal court decisions. The courts had said Moore’s
action to place a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama judicial
headquarters building in Montgomery was unconstitutional.
Moore’s decision to run in the 2006 election means he will likely
go head-to-head with current Gov. Bob Riley, who is a conservative
and a Southern Baptist, in the Republican primary.
Announcing his candidacy in Gadsden, near his home, the
58-year-old Moore said he wouldn’t try to bring the monument back to
a government building. It now sits in the narthex of an evangelical
Protestant church in Gadsden.
“But I’ll tell you what I will do,” he said, according to news
reports. “I will defend the right of every citizen of this
state—including judges, coaches, teachers, city, county and state
officials—to acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty
and government.”
Moore, a Republican, was elected to head the state’s judiciary in
2000, after gaining fame for refusing to remove another tribute to
the Decalogue from the wall of his courtroom as a county judge in
rural Alabama. In the summer of 2001, he installed a two-ton granite
monument featuring the Protestant King James version of the
commandments in the center of the judicial building’s rotunda. The
installation took place without the permission or knowledge of
Moore’s colleagues on the court.
A group of Alabama attorneys sued Moore for violating the First
Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion. Federal
courts at every level agreed with them, and ordered Moore to remove
the monument.
Moore refused to do so, contending—as he had in the lawsuit over
the monument itself—his oath of office required him to “acknowledge
God” and the monument was his way of doing so.
A state judicial-ethics panel removed him from office for
refusing the federal orders. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and
then-Attorney General Bill Pryor, both fellow Republicans, supported
that decision, which was upheld by both a specially appointed state
Supreme Court and the federal Supreme Court.
Riley spokesman Jeff Emerson, in a statement released after
Moore’s announcement, said much of the former judge’s proposed
platform echoes the current governor’s.
“It appears Roy Moore is campaigning on an agenda that echoes the
same positions Gov. Riley has already taken,” he said. “Most of the
issues Roy Moore outlined were detailed in Gov. Riley’s ‘Plan for
Change’ back in 2002, and Gov. Riley has worked ever since then to
implement them.”
Besides the religious component, Moore’s announced platform
includes term limits for state legislators and immigration reform.
Riley angered some of the state’s conservatives in 2004 by
endorsing an effort to reform the state’s constitution and tax code,
which many economists have said perpetuates poverty in Alabama. A
wide array of Alabama’s religious and other special-interest groups
endorsed tax reform as a way to provide relief to poor and
middle-class people. But some conservative groups—including the
state affiliate of the Christian Coalition—feared it would have made
it easier for legislators to raise taxes.
Source:
http://www.baptiststandard.com/postnuke/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=4013
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