Roy Moore
Roy Stewart Moore is an American politician, lawyer, and jurist who served as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2013 to 2017, each time being removed from office for judicial misconduct by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. He was the Republican Party nominee in the 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama to fill the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, but was accused by several women of sexually assaulting them while they were underage and lost to Democratic candidate Doug Jones. Moore ran for the same Senate seat again in 2020 and lost the Republican primary.
Moore attended West Point and served as a company commander in the Military Police Corps during the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Alabama Law School, he joined the Etowah County district attorney's office, serving as an assistant district attorney from 1977 to 1982. In 1992, he was appointed as a circuit judge by Governor Guy Hunt to fill a vacancy, and was elected to the position at the next term. In 2001, Moore was elected to the position of chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama. Moore was removed from his position in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing a federal court's order to remove a marble monument of the Ten Commandments that he had placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building.
Moore sought the Republican nomination for the governorship of Alabama in 2006 and 2010, but lost in the primaries. Moore was elected again as chief justice in 2013, but he was suspended in May 2016, for defying a U.S. Supreme Court decision about same-sex marriage, and resigned in April 2017. On September 26, 2017, he won a primary runoff to become the Republican candidate in a special election for a U.S. Senate seat that had been vacated by Jeff Sessions.
In November 2017, during his special election campaign for U.S. Senate, several public allegations of sexual misconduct were made against Moore. Three women stated that he had sexually assaulted them when they were at the respective ages of 14, 16 and 28; six other women reported that Moore – then in his 30s – pursued sexual relationships with them while they were as young as 16. Moore acknowledged that he may have approached and dated teenagers while he was in his 30s, but denied sexually assaulting anyone. President Donald Trump endorsed Moore a week before the election, after which some Republicans withdrew their opposition to Moore. Democrat Doug Jones won the election, becoming the first Democrat since 1992 to win a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama.
Moore's political views have been characterized as far-right and Christian nationalist. He has attracted national media attention and controversy over his views on race, homosexuality, transgender people, and Islam, his belief that Christianity should dictate public policy, and his past ties to neo-Confederate and white-nationalist groups. Moore was a leading voice in the "birther" movement, which promoted the false claim that president Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He founded the Foundation for Moral Law, a non-profit legal organization from which he collected more than $1 million over five years. On its tax filings, the organization indicated a much lesser amount of pay to Moore.
Early life
Education and military service
Moore was born in Gadsden, Alabama, the seat of Etowah County, to construction worker Roy Baxter Moore, who died in 1967, and Evelyn Stewart. He is the oldest of five children, and grew up with two brothers and two sisters. In 1954, the family relocated to Houston, Texas, the site of a postwar building boom. After about four years, they returned to Alabama, then moved to Pennsylvania, and then returned permanently to Alabama. His father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, first building dams and later the Anniston Army Depot. Moore attended his freshman year of high school at Gallant near Gadsden, and transferred to Etowah County High School for his final three years, graduating in 1965.Moore was admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, on the recommendation of outgoing Democratic U.S. representative Albert Rains, and after confirmation of that nomination by incoming Republican representative James D. Martin of Gadsden. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree. With the Vietnam War underway, Moore served in several posts as a military police officer, including Fort Benning, Georgia, and Illesheim, West Germany, before being deployed to South Vietnam. Serving as the commander of 188th Military Police Company of the 504th Military Police Battalion, Moore was perceived to be reckless, but very strict. He insisted that his troops salute him on the battlefield, despite official training which discourages such behavior because salutes can identify an officer to enemy targeting. Some of his soldiers gave him the derogatory nickname "Captain America", due to his attitude toward discipline. This role earned him enemies, and in his autobiography he recalls sleeping on sandbags to avoid a grenade or bomb being tossed under his cot, as many of his men had threatened him with fragging.
Moore was discharged from the United States Army as a captain in 1974, and was admitted to the University of Alabama School of Law that same year. A professor and fellow students held him in low regard due to his incapacity for keen analysis. He graduated in 1977 with a Juris Doctor degree and returned to Gadsden.
Elections and travels
Moore soon moved to the district attorney's office, working as the first full-time prosecutor in Etowah County. During his tenure there, Moore was investigated by the state bar for "suspect conduct" after convening a grand jury to examine what he perceived to have been funding shortages in the sheriff's office. Several weeks after the state bar investigation was dismissed as unfounded, Moore quit his prosecuting position to run as a Democrat for the county's circuit-court judge seat in 1982. The election was bitter, with Moore alleging that cases were being delayed in exchange for payoffs. The allegations were never substantiated. Moore overwhelmingly lost the Democratic runoff primary to fellow attorney Donald Stewart, whom Moore described as "an honorable man for whom I have much respect, eventually became a close friend". A second bar complaint against Moore followed, which was dismissed as unfounded. Moore left Gadsden shortly thereafter to live for a year in Australia.In Australia, a country Moore said later he had wanted to visit after his service in Vietnam but was unable to at the time, he went to Queensland. From the state capital, Brisbane, he first went to Ayr and helped with the sugar cane harvest, then inland to what is now the Central Highlands Region, where he fulfilled his longtime desire to see the Outback, eventually working at the Telemon ranch near Springsure, a town where many residents are devout Christians. One of them, the Rolfe family, ran Telemon, and spoke highly of Moore to The Guardian in 2017, "I don't think he'd ever done that sort of manual labor in his life," said Isla Turner, daughter of Colin Rolfe, who had taken Moore in, "but he took to it like a duck to water".
Moore married Kayla Kisor in December 1985. In 1986, he ran for Etowah County's district attorney position against fellow Democrat Jimmy Hedgspeth, but was defeated. In 1992, Moore switched his affiliation to the Republican Party.
Judicial career
Circuit Judge (1992–2000)
Appointment
In 1992, Etowah County circuit judge Julius Swann died in office. Republican governor H. Guy Hunt was charged with making an appointment until the next election. Moore's name was floated by some of his associates, and a background check was initiated with several state and county agencies, including the Etowah County district attorney's office. Moore's former political opponent Jimmy Hedgspeth, who still helmed the D.A.'s office, recommended Moore despite personal reservations, and Moore was installed in the position he had failed to win in 1982. Moore ran as a Republican in the 1994 Etowah County election and was elected to the circuit judge seat with 62% of the vote. He was the first county-wide Republican to win since Reconstruction.Early prayer/Ten Commandments controversy
During Moore's tenure as circuit judge, he hung a homemade wooden Ten Commandments plaque on the wall of his courtroom behind his bench. Moore told the Montgomery Advertiser that his intention in hanging the plaque was to fill up the bare space on the courtroom walls and to indicate the importance of the Ten Commandments. He stated that it was not his intention to generate controversy. He told The Atlantic that he understood the potential for controversy existed, but "I wanted to establish the moral foundation of our law."While Moore presided over a murder case shortly after his appointment, the defendant's attorney objected to the plaque. This attracted the attention of critics who also objected to Moore's practice of opening court sessions with a prayer beseeching divine guidance for jurors in their deliberations. In at least one case, Moore asked a clergyman to lead the court's jury pool in prayer. The local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter in June 1993 threatening a lawsuit if such prayers did not cease.
On June 20, 1994, the ACLU sent a representative to Moore's courtroom to observe and record the pre-session prayer. Although the organization did not immediately file suit, Moore decried the action as an "act of intimidation" in a post-trial press conference. The incident drew additional attention to Moore while he was campaigning to hold onto his circuit court seat. In that year's election, Moore won the seat in a landslide victory over attorney Keith Pitts, who had unsuccessfully prosecuted the "Silk and Satin" murder case.