There is more to Roy Moore than the allegations that he had improper relations with teenage girls when he was in his 30s: he is also one of the staunchest anti-LGBTQ politicians in recent memory.
Reporters outside of Moore’s rally in Midland City, Alabama last night encountered Nathan Mathis, an Alabama resident whose lesbian daughter committed suicide at the age of 23. He was there to protest Moore’s treatment and policies against the LGBTQ community, noting some of the incendiary things that the Alabama Republican senate candidate has said over the years. “How is my daughter a pervert just because she was gay?” he said to reporters.
Father, who says he's a local peanut farmer in Wicksburg, outside Roy Moore rally talks about losing his gay daughter at age of 23 to suicide. "I was anti-gay myself. I said bad things to my daughter, which I regret." pic.twitter.com/J0oOU0EJI2
— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) December 11, 2017
Mathis’ comments last night stand in stark contrast to what Moore’s campaign said this afternoon. Ted Crockett, a spokesman for Moore’s campaign, reiterated the candidate’s firm anti-LGBT stance to CNN’s Jake Tapper. When Tapper asked Crockett if Moore thinks homosexual conduct should be illegal, Crockett responded, “Probably.”
“We need to get back to moral law,” Crockett later added in his response to Tapper.
Does Roy Moore think that homosexual conduct should be illegal?
Roy Moore campaign spokesman: “Probably.”https://t.co/syuQfsAvO5 pic.twitter.com/nPDYLfQahY
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) December 12, 2017
As hesitant as Crockett may sound in this clip, Moore’s record is crystal clear: he intends to infringe on the civil rights of LGBTQ Americans, regardless of the laws of the land. “Homosexual conduct is and has been considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and nature’s god upon which the nation and our laws are predicated,” he wrote in his 2005 book So Help Me God: The Ten Commandments, Judicial Tyranny, and the Battle for Religious Freedom. In 2016, Moore was suspended as the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for ordering probate judges to defy the federal Supreme Court’s recently established same sex marriage ruling. (It was the second time he had been removed from that position.) And while on the campaign trail in Montgomery last month, Moore told the crowd, “The transgenders don’t have rights.”
More on the Alabama race from News & Guts.