Roy Moore is back in the news and it has nothing to do with the brilliance of some legal opinion he wrote.
Instead, it is because the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court has decided to flout a ruling by the nation’s highest court about gay marriage.
Moore got into a pickle once before when he refused to take down the Ten Commandments from the court building grounds in Montgomery, Ala. He got removed from office, then was elected again to the court. I didn’t have as much of a problem with that as I do with his latest bit of judicial grandstanding.
This time, the judge has ruled that Alabama doesn’t have to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
He ordered in January that probate judges can keep enforcing the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. A state judicial conduct office has filed a formal complaint against Moore, resulting in his immediate suspension from the bench until this matter is resolved.
Let’s just consider for a moment a critical element here.
Alabama is one of 50 states. Its judges take oaths to follow the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court, moreover, is empowered to interpret that Constitution and to determine what’s legal under its framework.
The high court has determined that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause gives gay couples the same rights of marriage as heterosexual couples. The ruling makes gay marriage legal in all 50 states … and yep, that includes Alabama.
Chief Justice Moore, it appears to me, lacks the standing to make unilateral decisions when they contradict rulings by the duly appointed U.S. Supreme Court.
The complaint against him will play itself out in due course.
It’s interesting to me that a true-blue conservative jurist would rail against what he would consider to be acts of “judicial activism.”
I think I would describe Chief Justice Roy Moore’s edict as just such an act.