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THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union began its onslaught against Alabama Judge Roy Moore in 1995, when an ACLU lawyer, depressed that he was not chosen to play Mrs. Claus in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade that year, wrote a letter to all the state judges in Alabama protesting their practice of having a prayer in the courtroom every few weeks. (Obviously you can't have prayer in court: It might distract all the people holding their hand over a Bible and swearing before God almighty to tell the truth.) Everything had been going just fine in Alabama – no defendant had ever complained about the practice – but upon receiving a testy letter from the ACLU, all the other Alabama judges immediately ceased and desisted from the foul practice of allowing prayer in court. Judge Moore did not. For resisting the ACLU's bullying, Moore became High Value Target No. 1. Soon the ACLU and its ilk were filing lawsuits and anonymous ethics complaints against Moore. The ACLU along with the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Moore for having a Ten Commandments plaque in his courtroom. (Poverty had been nearly eliminated in the South until a poor person happened to gaze upon Moore's Ten Commandments – and then it was back to square one.)
An affirmative action, Carter-appointed judge (oh sorry, I forgot – we're only allowed to say that about Clarence Thomas) found that the Ten Commandments plaque violated the First Amendment. Apparently, in a little-noticed development, Judge Moore had become "Congress," his Ten Commandments plaque was a "law," and the plaque established a national religion. The Taliban had better legal justification to blow up centuries-old Buddha statues in Afghanistan. The then-governor of Alabama, "Fob" James, responded to the inane ruling by saying he'd send in the Alabama National Guard if anyone tried to take down Moore's Ten Commandments. That's all it took. The Alabama Supreme Court backed off from a confrontation with the governor by dismissing the ACLU's suit on technical grounds. Both Moore and James were soon re-elected in landslides, Moore to chief justice. Liberals reacted to the overwhelming popularity of the state officials who resisted the ACLU by accusing them of stirring up the Ten Commandments dispute as a publicity stunt. The president of the Alabama ACLU said "the whole thing is political," and that Moore and James were using it as an election issue. The ACLU sues, and for not surrendering immediately, state officials are media whores. Thus, according to Time magazine, Judge Moore has been on a "crusade" since – in Time's own words – "he defended his right to display" the Ten Commandments. It "should have surprised no one" the magazine continued, when Moore installed the Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse lobby and "forced a showdown by refusing to remove it." In other words, Moore defended himself from one ACLU lawsuit and then – as if that weren't enough! – he did not instantly surrender when the ACLU filed a second lawsuit. That guy sure knows how to get publicity. Indeed, Moore maintained his disagreement with the ACLU's interpretation of the Constitution as creating a universal ban on God right up until he was out of a job. A lot of conservatives said Moore was wrong to refuse to comply with the court's idiotic ruling. The conservative argument for enforcing manifestly absurd court rulings is that the only other option is anarchy. But we are already living in anarchy. It's a one-sided, "Alice in Wonderland" anarchy in which liberals always win and conservatives always lose – and then cheerfully enforce their own defeats. Oh, you see an abortion clause in there? OK, I don't see it, but we'll enforce it. Sodomy, too, you say? OK, it's legal. Gay marriage? Just give us a minute to change the law. No prayer in schools? It's out. Go-go dancing is speech, but protest at abortion clinics isn't? Okey-dokey. No Ten Commandments in the courthouse? Somebody get the number of a monument removal service. What passes for "constitutional law" can be fairly summarized as: Heads we win, tails you lose. The only limit on liberal insanity in this country is how many issues liberals can get before a court. Apparently the only thing standing between a government of laws and total anarchy is the fact that conservatives are good losers. If we don't give liberals everything they want, when they want it, anarchy will result. We must obey manifestly absurd court rulings, so that liberals obey court rulings when they lose. Point one: They almost never lose. Point two: They already refuse to accept laws they don't like. They do it all the time – race discrimination bans, bilingual education bans, marijuana bans. They refuse to accept the Electoral College when their candidate wins the popular vote, and they refuse to accept sexual harassment laws when their president is the accused. If you don't let them win every game, they walk off with the football. I'm not sure what horror is supposed to befall the nation if the liberals started ignoring the law more than they already do, but apparently it would be even worse than a country in which the Ten Commandments have been stripped from every public space, prayer in schools is outlawed, sodomy is a constitutional right, and more than 1 million unborn children are aborted every year. |
