Judgment Day Is at Hand in Alabama

Roy Moore is as tough as a cheap cut of Alabama barbecue. And almost as salty.

He’s a kick-boxing, steer-wrestling, built-his-house-with-his-own-two-hands judge who became famous a few years back for sticking a plaque of the Ten Commandments on the wall of his Etowah County courtroom and then refusing to take it down. Now he’s running for the highest judgeship in the state. And he’s fixing to win.

Roy Moore has unswervingly fundamentalist Christian beliefs, such as that the world was created in seven days and abortion is murder. In this way, he’s no different from many people in the Bible Belt. But his personal story is truly far-out: how he grew up broke, the son of a jackhammer man, went to West Point, became a prosecutor, quit, became a professional kick boxer, won, left the States to rustle cattle in Australia and then returned to Gadsden, an old-fashioned riverfront town, to be a lawyer again and then a judge.

This week, he’s up for election to chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Despite the drubbing he has taken in the media and serious concerns many have voiced about his blend of church and state, polls put Moore, a Republican, ahead of Democratic Judge Sharon Yates by five to 15 percentage points. It seems that his moral crusade has tapped into two arteries in Alabama: religion and defiance.

“We call it the Bubba vote,” said Brad Owen, an Alabama lobbyist. (Bubba is Southern speak for “the average Joe.”) “No matter how much Bubba likes to drink and cuss and get in trouble, he still prays before he eats and puts God first. And he likes a man who makes a stand. There’s no doubt which way Bubba’s going on this one.”

In Alabama it’s not unusual to see a pickup truck rumble past with both a gun rack and a “Real Men Love Jesus” bumper sticker. While fundamentalists in Kansas lost their battle against evolution, and school prayer supporters were defeated in Texas, evangelical Christians still set the agenda here. Alabama law calls for all public school science books to be labeled with a sticker that says evolution is only a theory.

Nonetheless, some people are concerned about Moore extending the role of religion in public life. “Roy could sure mess things up good,” said Roger Monroe, a civil appeals judge. “The law says church and state should be separate. That’s what the framers intended. But Roy’s got his own views, and he’ll be in a better spot to enforce them.”

Moore has spent the last month crisscrossing the 50,750-square-mile state, hopping from one campaign event to the next, from the Gulf of Mexico to downtown Birmingham to the ruggedly beautiful hill country near the Georgia border. Picture a 53-year-old balding man with a level, grayish stare, sitting behind the wheel of an old blue Caddy, winding his way along leaf-scattered back roads, sometimes zooming past signs that read “Roy Moore: Still the Ten Commandments Judge.” Often, strangers recognize him and share their affection.

“Oh, judge, I just wanted to tell my husband that I shook your hand,” said one woman as she pressed her palm into his outside a Republican luncheon near Huntsville. Before the luncheon, Moore visited the Huntsville Times editorial board. “I’m not sure why I even came here, ‘cause I’ve read some of your articles and y’all blistered me,” Moore said in his thick Alabama twang as he eased into a chair in front of a table full of journalists.

Huntsville Times Publisher Bob Ludwig took a swig of coffee from a mug stamped “Big Boss” and stared flatly back. Some of the writers began asking questions.

“What’s your take on same-sex marriage, judge?”

“Well, I’m not supposed to speak about specific issues, but let’s put it this way,” Moore said. “What if a man wants to marry a cow? Or a man and a cow? Or how ‘bout 55 men? See what I mean?”

It wasn’t long before he was pressed on religion. His tactic at times like these is to quote long passages from the Constitution and “The Federalist Papers” verbatim, not missing a single “wherefore” or “thou,” reaching deep into the recesses of a seemingly photographic memory.

“I know some of y’all won’t agree with me, but all I can do is put these facts out on the table,” Moore said.

Moore left the interview confident he wouldn’t get the paper’s endorsement (he was right). His next stop was Circuit City--the only place he could find on the outskirts of Huntsville with a TV and VCR to screen two new campaign spots.

The first commercial was one on the warrior judge with lots of American flags and shots of the Ten Commandments. The second showed him with his family, eating dinner, watching football, jogging up a hill with his four kids.

“Look at that gut,” he laughed.

In contrast to his resolute, sometimes bullheaded positions on religion and the law, Moore has a milder, self-effacing side.

He’s always been like that, say folks who know him.

His high school guidance counselor remembered young Roy, whose father jackhammered roads for a living, as a poor kid but friendly and popular. “He came from a meager background, but you could tell he wanted to be somebody,” Mary John Snead said.

At age 17, Moore won a place at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He graduated 640th out of a class of 800 and then served in Vietnam. Afterward, he returned to Alabama for law school and got a job as a prosecutor. During a 1978 murder trial, he sliced the coat of his suit with a Buck knife while trying to act out a murder. “Guess the demonstration didn’t go as planned,” he said.

Moore ran for judge in Etowah County in 1982--back then he was a Democrat--and lost. He said the good ol’ boys shut him out.

So he fought back. With his fists and his feet. At himself. At a trainer named Ismael. And then finally at some poor guy whose name nobody remembers whom Moore pummeled in front of a cheering hometown crowd. “I had a lot of anger,” he said.

Moore had quit the law in 1982 to train as a professional kick boxer. After his one and only pro fight, he took off again, this time to Australia, where he met an old rancher who turned the moderate Baptist onto religion. A year later, a cattle-wise and spiritually rejuvenated Moore returned to Gadsden.

Yes, Moore acknowledges, his life does seem sort of random. In a way, that’s how he got tangled up in the Ten Commandments controversy.

“I was just looking for something to decorate my new courtroom with and I saw them hanging over the dining room table and thought, hey, they’d look good,” said Moore, who was appointed to the bench in 1992.

Three years later, the ACLU (a four-letter word in some homes around here) sued, claiming the display was an unconstitutional advancement of religion by a state official. Moore argued his homemade 18-by-24-inch rosewood plaque was not coercive or intimidating.

The first judge on the case ordered Moore to take it down. Moore refused. The state’s new governor, Fob James Jr., threatened to send in the National Guard to protect Moore’s plaque.

Moore became a cause celebre. He spoke at Christian events around the country. He held rallies. After a higher court threw out the first judge’s order because of insufficient legal standing, Moore’s popularity soared even higher, boosting his name recognition into that stratospheric realm few other judges this side of Lance Ito ever enjoy.

William G. Doty, a University of Alabama religion professor, said Alabama is one of the most religiously conservative states, partly because of its history as a monocultural society dominated by Scotch-Irish Protestantism. “You have people around here who still think the Puritans were right,” Doty said.

Joel Sogol, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Moore’s defiance on the Ten Commandments sends a message that “he does not have to obey the law because he answers to a higher law.”

“Would Roy Moore be able to punish someone who took a life in an abortion bombing if that person said, ‘God told me to do this’?” Sogol asked. “I don’t know.”

Chief justice in Alabama is a mighty position. The nine-judge high court is split into two panels of four, and the chief justice, who is paid a base salary of $141,500 annually, sits on both panels. The chief justice also can influence decisions by picking which lower court judges will hear controversial cases.

The only person who stands between Moore and that power is Yates. Alabama is among the handful of states that still hold partisan judicial races.

Yates, 47, the first woman on the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals, is trying to run on her administrative experience and evenhanded record. But she’s been dragged into the religion issue and often reminds people that she abides by the Ten Commandments, too.

“The Ten Commandments belong to all of us,” she said at a recent appearance in Rainesville. “Alabama is a state of great faith.”

Moore, if he wins, may test the limits of that faith. He hasn’t committed himself to hanging the Ten Commandments in the high courtroom. But at the end of a recent campaigning day, as he stood in a dark parking lot in Birmingham, he hinted his views won’t soften.

“These ideas I have about the law, these things I say, the place I’m intending to go,” he said, “I’m not sure the people are ready for this.”

Then he unlocked the car, climbed into his scruffy Cadillac and pointed the wheel north, to Gadsden.