Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore as
recently as late last year compared marriage equality to slavery.
Moore, who won his state's GOP primary
despite President Donald Trump's backing of Senator Luther Strange,
said in November that the Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell
that struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide was “even worse”
than the 1857 Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery, which is
widely considered by scholars to be the high court's worst decision.
“In 1857 the United States Supreme
Court did rule that black people were property. Of course that
contradicted the Constitution, and it took a civil war to overturn
it. But this ruling in Obergefell is even worse in a sense
because it forces not only people to recognize marriage other than
the institution ordained of God and recognized by nearly every state
in the union, it says that you now must do away with the definition
of marriage and make it between two persons of the same gender or
leading on, as one of the dissenting justices said, to polygamy, to
multi-partner marriages,” Moore said in a podcast interview with
Here I Stand.
“We’ve got to go back and recognize
that what they did in Obergefell was not only to take and
create a right that does not exist under the Constitution but then to
mandate that that right compels Christians to give up their religious
freedom and liberty,” he continued.
Moore has twice been removed as the
chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, most recently last year
for ordering probate judges in his state to ignore the Supreme
Court's ruling in Obergefell.
“The Dred Scott decision ranks
as the worst Supreme Court decision in American history and it’s
appalling that Moore doesn’t understand that, though sadly not
surprising considering his history of embracing white supremacists
and pro-Confederate groups,” American
Bridge spokesperson Allison Teixeira Sulier told Talking
Points Memo. “Roy Moore is not fit to serve in any
capacity, and his hateful views are un-American.”
In an early 2015 interview with Chris
Cuomo, the host of CNN's New Day, Moore
also compared marriage equality to slavery.