HANNITY: “Let’s take you out of this for a second. Let’s say, if any Senate candidate who was 32 at the time had done this to a 14-year-old girl, to me it’s disgusting. To me, it would be despicable. To me, that is a predator.”
MOORE: “Yeah.”
HANNITY: “Do you agree with me, that no such person who ever does that should ever be in the United States Senate?”
MOORE: “Of course. Nobody who abuses a 14-year-old at age 32 or age 17—it doesn’t matter—if you abuse a 14-year-old you shouldn’t be a Senate candidate. I agree with that. But I did not do that.”
HANNITY: “Let’s go back to it one more question, because I didn’t understand this. If you were 32, and you do date a 17 or 18 year old—that’s a pretty big gap for a pretty young girl—is that something that you did when you were dating? I’m not talking about the 14-year-old in that specific allegation. Would it be normal behavior back in those days for you to date a girl that’s 17 or 18?”
MOORE: “No. Not normal.”
HANNITY: “My daughter is 16 years old. If she’s 17 or 18, I don’t want her dating a 32-year-old.”
MOORE: “I wouldn’t either.”
HANNITY: “And you can say unequivocally that you never dated anybody that was in their late teens like that when you were 32?”
MOORE: “It would have been out of my customary behavior, that’s right.”
HANNITY: “In other words, you don’t recall dating any girl that young when you were that old?”
MOORE: “I’ve said no.”
HANNITY: “And you think that’s inappropriate, too, that’s what you’re saying?”
MOORE: “Yes.”
Jesus’ Parents and Roy Moore’s Gall
When Zeigler was asked by The Washington Examiner about an allegation that the Senate candidate Roy Moore initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32, Zeigler cited the biblical couple to say, essentially: No biggie! This is as old as Christianity.
“Take Joseph and Mary,” he explained. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.” He made it sound as if Moore were some religiously inclined analogue to those military-history enthusiasts who dress in the uniforms of yesteryear to travel back to the Revolutionary War. Moore was merely re-enacting the New Testament in the name of lust.
It’s worth pointing out that there is something illegal here: A 14-year-old girl is below the age of consent in Alabama, and that was true as well four decades ago, when the incident is alleged to have occurred. It’s also worth pointing out that Jesus supposedly arrived via virgin birth, so Joseph’s interactions with Mary up until that point may have been considerably more G-rated and gallant than in Zeigler’s version.
It’s further worth pointing out that millenniums ago, girls were treated as chattel and sold off as child brides, a practice that no one in his or her right mind would regard as inspirational and cite as an exonerating precedent.
.. If I sound bitter, I am, because they have long been among the principal purveyors of hatred for gay people like me. They’re a big reason that so many of us grew up terrified that we’d be ostracized, wondering if there was something twisted in us and confronted with laws that treated us as second-class citizens. We were supposedly in moral error, and thus deserved a lesser lot.
.. In 2002 he called sexual relations between people of the same gender “an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.”
.. Although Christianity as I understand it doesn’t smile on the florid lying, womanizing, hypersexual vocabulary and assorted cruelties that have been prominent threads in Donald Trump’s life, Moore and many other evangelical Christians spared Trump their censure. I understand their motivation to vote for him: abortion. But that didn’t compel them to remain so mum about his misdeeds or summon the adoration that some of them did. (I’m looking at you, Jerry Falwell Jr.)