The Benevolent Thou

Rational Press (RP) – Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is today’s winner of the Legion of Dishonor Award for his open defiance of Constitutional law; specifically for his history of disregard for, or his ignorance of the intent of the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. He is hereby inducted into the National Hall of Injustice.

Recently, Moore insisted that biblical law supersedes the Constitution, and to that end he issued an illegal order—demanding that local magistrates not issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples—in an effort to countermand the Supreme Court of the United States. For a judge to declare that his ancient, religious views override the Constitution and to act on that belief is, in the opinion of this Board of Inductions, judicial treason, punishable by firing and disbarment. He is a disgrace to the bench.

The federal courts have virtually always come down on the side religious freedom for everyone, but that freedom gives no one a right to compromise the freedom of others, e.g., freedom of conscience and the right to pursue happiness according to the dictates of conscience. All citizens must be equal before the law, and any law, based on religious conviction, inherently relegates some citizens to second-class status. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom for adherents of one religion to rule over adherents to other religions, or to rule over those who adhere to none at all.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom–the document from which the Establishment Clause was crafted and to which virtually all courts refer in church v. state cases:

[The] impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time: That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors,4 is sinful and tyrannical . . .

Still, Moore isn’t entirely to blame. His religious tyranny is reflective of the will of ignorant voters who tend to elect such pompous, self-righteous, and/or ignorant men to high places.