In 2002, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling in a child custody battle between a lesbian mother and an allegedly abusive father. The parents had originally lived in Los Angeles, and when they divorced in 1992, the mother received primary physical custody. But she was an alcoholic, and in 1996, she sent her three children to live with her ex-husband, who'd since moved to Alabama, while she went to rehab. Her lawyer, Wendy Brooks Crew, told me they had an understanding that the kids would stay with their dad for a year, but he refused to return them to their mother because she was living with a woman.
There was evidence that the father was abusing the kids, who by 2002 were teenagers. He acknowledged whipping them with a belt and forcing them to sit with paper bags over their heads. He refused to send the younger children to summer school, even though their grades were bad. When the kids called their mother, their father taped the conversations. By the time the case got to the Alabama Supreme Court, a lower court had ruled in the mother's favor. The Alabama Supreme Court reversed the ruling, with then Chief Justice Roy Moore writing in a concurring opinion that a gay person couldn't be a fit parent.
"Homosexual conduct is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature's God upon which this nation and our laws are predicated," wrote Moore. He added, "The state carries the power of the sword, that is, the power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as confinement and even execution. It must use that power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle."
The man who wrote those words is now the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Alabama. In some ways, this is an embarrassment for Donald Trump, who heeded establishment advice to support Moore's opponent, sitting Senator Luther Strange, in the primary. But Moore's victory is also a victory for Trumpism, a populist movement that has eroded normal limits on political behavior.
On the surface, Trump and Moore couldn't be more different. The president is a thrice-married former casino owner who let Howard Stern call his own daughter a "piece of ass." Moore is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist who writes rhyming verse denouncing wanton sex. "Your children wander aimlessly poisoned by cocaine/Choosing to indulge their lusts, when God has said abstain," he wrote in his sarcastically titled poem "America the Beautiful." Trump described himself, during his campaign, as a "real friend" of the L.G.B.T. community, even if he hasn't behaved like one in office. Moore has said that gay sex should be illegal.
But read the rest of "America the Beautiful," and you start to see where Trump and Moore's worldviews overlap. Both see a nation in apocalyptic decline, desperate for redemption. Whereas Trump spoke of "American carnage" in his dystopian inauguration speech, Moore calls the country a "moral slum" awaiting God's judgment. Like the president, Moore is a conspiracy theorist who demonizes religious minorities; he once wrote that Keith Ellison, a Democrat from Minnesota, should not be allowed to serve in the House of Representatives because he is Muslim.I met Moore over a decade ago, when I was researching my first book, "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." By then, Moore had been forced off the bench for refusing a federal judge's order to remove a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the state judicial building. This martyrdom made him a cult figure on the religious right. A group of retired military men had taken the monument on tour, holding over 150 viewings and rallies; at an event in Austin, Tex., one of them spoke bitterly to me about the outsized power of American Jews. (Moore would later be re-elected to his seat, only to be suspended for the rest of his term in 2016 for ordering judges not to comply with the Supreme Court decision overturning bans on gay marriage.)
In trying to understand the movement I was reporting on, I turned to scholars of authoritarianism and fascism. If their words seemed relevant then, they're even more so now. Fritz Stern, a historian who fled Nazi Germany, described the "conservative revolution" that prefigured National Socialism: "The movement did embody a paradox: its followers sought to destroy the despised present in order to recapture an idealized past in an imaginary future."
His formulation helps explain the overlapping appeal of Trump and Moore, who thrill their supporters with their distinctly un-conservative eagerness to destroy legal and political norms. What Moore's critics see as lawlessness, his fans see as insurgent valor. Trump's most prominent nationalist supporters, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, lined up behind Moore, describing him as part of the Trumpian revolution. Nigel Farage, a right-wing British politician and Trump ally, flew to Fairhope, Ala., to speak at a rally for Moore, saying on stage, "It is getting someone like him elected that will rejuvenate the movement that led to Trump and Brexit."
Whether or not that's true, the movement that led to Trump has brought us to a place where Moore will probably soon sit in the United States Senate, something I could hardly have imagined when I first encountered him. Back then, anti-gay prejudice was far more acceptable than it is today, but Moore's messianic denunciation of a lesbian mother was still shocking. Trump is not a pious man, but by destroying informal restraints on reactionary rhetoric, he's made his party hospitable to the cruelest of theocrats. Moore's success is bound to encourage more candidates like him. The Republican establishment's borders have been breached. Its leaders should have built a wall.
This is Michelle Goldberg's second column at the New York Times, September 29, 2017.
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September 29, 2017
