Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore testified before the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee June 8.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the panel’s chairman, called the hearing to discuss what he called “hostility to religious expression in the public square.” But critics said the hearing was an election-year ploy to showcase the deposed judge.
Alabama officials last year removed Moore as chief justice of the state Supreme Court after he defied a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument he had placed in the rotunda of the state judicial headquarters. Although two federal courts ruled that the monument violated the First Amendment, Moore claimed both the Alabama and federal constitutions require him to “acknowledge God” via such a display.
Before the Senate subcommittee, Moore said the debate over religious expression in the public square is not a debate between those who are “for God or against God. It’s between those who understand the First Amendment and those who do not.”
Acknowledging God
Moore said the First Amendment was designed so people — including state officials — could “acknowledge God according to the dictates of their conscience” without interference from the federal government. “The issue is the government’s interference with the right of the people of these states to acknowledge God,” Moore said.
He said the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion did not apply in his case because his monument was not an establishment of religion and wasn’t erected by the federal government.
But Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, said Moore’s action to set up the Ten Commandments monument is hard to understand as anything other than an establishment of religion.
Moore, himself a Baptist, accused Walker of “hypocrisy” for leading a Baptist group but saying “that a public official cannot represent God.” But Walker denied saying or believing that.
Noting that public officials can allow their belief in God to influence their actions in many ways, Walker said, “What you can’t do is put up a monument in the middle of the courthouse that starts by saying, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods before me.’ That’s not an acknowledgement; that’s an establishment.”
Moore said in his testimony that to establish a religion there must be a creed, ministers and ordinances, none of which his monument had.
Moore is a member of First Baptist Church, Gallant, but officials of Cross Point Community Church, Gadsden, say Moore attends church there when he is in Gadsden. Both churches are in Etowah Association. (ABP)
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