Alabama chief justice says federal judge ‘violated law’
The Layman Online, August 25, 2003
Roy S. Moore, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, argued August 25 in The Wall Street Journal that he is constitutionally bound to “the rule of law, and against any unilateral declaration of a judge to ban the acknowledgement of God in the public sector.”
Noting that the Alabama Constitution “specifically invokes ‘the favor and guidance of Almighty God’ as the basis for our laws and justice system,” Moore said he has taken an oath before God and man to uphold the state’s constitution “and I will not waver from that commitment.”
Federal Judge Myron Thompson ordered that a sculpture of the Ten Commandments be removed from federal court property in Montgomery, an action through which Thompson told “the state of Alabama that it may not acknowledge God … [and] effectively dismantled the justice system of the state,” Moore said.
In the Journal column, Moore argued that “Judge Thompson and all who supported his order violated the rule of law. Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor and my fellow justices have argued that they must act to remove the monument to preserve the rule of law. But the precise opposite is true: Article VI of the Constitution makes explicitly clear that the Constitution, and the laws made pursuant to it, are ‘the supreme Law of the Land.’ Judge Thompson and the judges of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have all sworn oaths which bind them to support the Constitution as it is written – not as they would personally prefer it to be written.”
Moore said his decision “to disregard the unlawful order of the federal judge was not civil disobedience, but the lawful response of the highest judicial officer of the state to his oath of office.”
He criticized “the fanciful tailors of revisionist jurisprudence” who have been working “to strip the public sector naked of every vestige of God and morality. They have done so based on fake readings and inconsistent applications of the First Amendment. They have said it is all right for the U.S. Supreme Court to publicly place the Ten Commandments on its walls, for Congress to open in prayer and for state capitals to have chaplains – as long as the words and ideas communicated by such do not really mean what they purport to communicate.”