Roy Moore – the former Alabama Supreme Court justice who has made a career out of opposing LGBTQ equality – said that steps to contain coronavirus are “tyranny.”
Writing on Twitter and Facebook, the failed Senate candidate from Alabama wrote that “healthy people are being quarantined, God is under attack, & Tyranny triumphs when fear reigns.”
Related: Roy Moore wants to bring back the 60’s because LGBTQ people didn’t have rights then
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He quoted the song “Chester” from the American Revolutionary War: “Let tyrants shake their iron rods… we fear them not, we trust in God,” equating the subjugation that led up to the Revolutionary War to not being able to go on a cruise during a global pandemic.
When 10 people can’t assemble in church or business then healthy people are being quarantined, our Constitution & faith in God is under attack, & Tyranny triumphs when fear reigns. “Let tyrants shake their iron rods…we fear them not, we trust in God” “Chester” 1770 Wm Billings
— Judge Roy Moore (@RealJudgeMoore) March 21, 2020
Moore also complained on Twitter that the economy was being “destroyed” because politicians don’t have enough faith in God and, oddly, the U.S. Constitution.
Businesses are closed, our economy is destroyed and churches are closed by tyrants who pander fear in the place of faith in God and our U S Constitution https://t.co/uNv3CovbA4
— Judge Roy Moore (@RealJudgeMoore) March 19, 2020
“James Madison would be shocked to see American liberty swept under the rug of coronavirus!” he wrote in another tweet.
“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberty”, James Madison would be shocked to see American liberty swept under the rug of coronavirus! Businesses are closed, our economy is destroyed and churches are closed by tyrants who pander fear in the place of faith
— Judge Roy Moore (@RealJudgeMoore) March 19, 2020
He also approvingly linked an article in the Alabama Political Reporter that juxtaposed his comments – James Madison quote included – with Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s (R) order to close restaurants’ dine-in services last week.
This isn’t the first time that Moore has stressed the importance of fealty to conservative dogma over public health. During his 2017 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Moore said that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) should be “completely repealed as soon as possible.”
Experts believe that around 30 million people would lose access to health care if the ACA is repealed, but Moore said that even Republicans’ “repeal and replace” plan was bad because “it’s socialized medicine at best.”
Moore was famously removed from his job as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama in 2003 when he refused a federal court order to take down a display of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. He was again elected as chief justice in 2012, and in 2016 he was suspended for telling lower courts to ignore the Obergefell Supreme Court ruling and not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
And his antipathy toward LGBTQ people runs deep. In 1996, he presided over a divorce case involving a lesbian woman and her straight husband. He ruled that the lesbian could only see her children with supervision because the kids would be “detrimentally affected” by the lesbian mom’s “lifestyle” because it is “forbidden both by the laws of the State of Alabama and the Laws of Nature.”
Moore was the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Alabama in a 2017 special election, where the GOP candidate is usually a shoe-in for winning the general election.
He ended up losing to Democratic candidate Doug Jones after several women came forward with sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations against Moore, including some who said they were minors when he attacked them. Moore denied all wrongdoing but ultimately lost the election.
Earlier this year, he lost the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
