I know Roy Moore. He’s always been a con artist.
The candidate has made a career of willfully misrepresenting the ideas he claims to stand for.
One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.One of his arguments was that the founders were aware of no religion other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise... that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom only for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law — underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality... I decided to play along. By Moore’s logic, I suggested, another clause of the First Amendment, freedom of the press, applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet.Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster.
.. Moore also asserts that he is a Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state , which grew in part out of Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.
.. For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.”
.. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for people on the margins, those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could toe the first rungs of the ladder toward socioeconomic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize.
.. The image that Moore has tried to project over the course of his career — as
- a constitutional authority,
- a Baptist and
- a representative of evangelical values
— is false, even fraudulent. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter he is.