Even though we had slavery

Dec 8th, 2017 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog
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Roy Moore has a history of running his mouth.

In 2005, Moore was interviewed by journalist Bill Press. During that interview, he argued that homosexuality should be illegal.

“Homosexual conduct should be illegal, yes,” he told Press when asked about his views on a contemporaneous Supreme Court decision. At the time, nearly half the country agreed; his campaign has not clarified whether he still holds this position.

But grown men perving on 14-year-old girls – that’s just fine. Fresh meat is the best, am I right?

A year ago, after Donald Trump’s election, Moore was askedat an event whether he believed that Obama was born in the United States.

“My personal belief is that he wasn’t,” Moore replied, “but that’s probably over and done in a few days, unless we get something else to come along.”

But what is the source of a “personal belief” of that kind? The location of Obama’s birth is a straightforward factual matter, not a fuzzy opinion-based metaphysical view. It’s a yes or no, here or there; it’s not ambiguous. There are official records that state where he was born; “belief” doesn’t come into it, personal or impersonal.

No, the only reason to claim to have a “personal belief” that Obama wasn’t born in the US is malice of the racist variety. It’s both anti-rational and racist; win-win.

In August of this year, Moore was interviewed by the Guardian. CNN excerpted part of the discussion.

The interviewer noted that Ronald Reagan once said that the Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the modern world.

“You could say that very well about America, couldn’t you?” Moore replied.

“Do you think?” the interviewer replied.

“Well, we promote a lot of bad things,” Moore said. Asked for an example, Moore replied, “Like same-sex marriage.” It was Moore’s refusal to uphold the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage that led to his second ouster from Alabama’s court.

That’s a moral black hole right there; no light can escape. He thinks sex between consenting adults is “the focus of evil” and sexual creeping by an adult male on pubescent children is A-ok. And he’s a judge. He apparently has no sensitivity to the question of harm, and is guided only by his own internal Squick dial.

In September, Moore held a rally in Florence, Ala. One of the members of the audience, an African American, asked Moore when he thought America was last great.

“I think it was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another,” Moore replied, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”

Well…mind you…slave families were not always united. Slave owners had a nasty habit of selling individual slaves away from their families.

When these comments resurfaced this week, many people noted that, in 2002, Republican Senate leader Trent Lott had made comments looking back favorably at the segregated South — which ended up costing him his position. Moore was looking back further, to a time before the Civil War, expressing that America was last great at a time when black people were enslaved.

Well he said even though. Be fair.

At Moore’s rally in Florence, he made other racially insensitive comments.

“Racially insensitive” is mediaese for “racist.”

“We were torn apart in the Civil War — brother against brother, North against South, party against party,” he said. “What changed?”

“Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting,” he continued. “What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God.”

Roy Moore’s god? Nope, that’s not going to work.

But he’ll probably be elected to the Senate next week.

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