Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore
The executive committee of the Alabama Republican Party has sided with state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore in a lawsuit over his administrative orders to judges regarding “same-sex marriage.”
A statement on Tuesday from Liberty Counsel, which is defending Moore, confirmed that the committee “passed a resolution … calling on the unelected Alabama Court of the Judiciary to drop the charges by the unelected Judicial Inquiry Commission (JIC) against Chief Justice Roy Moore.”
An individual who flamboyantly self-identifies as a transvestite drag queen, Ambrosia Starling, rallied citizens to complain about Moore after his orders directed judges in the state to follow the state constitution and state law defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
The state’s JIC produced six counts against Moore, all related to the marriage issue, and suspended him with pay pending a trial before the Court of the Judiciary.
Moore has argued, LC reported, “that the JIC has exceeded its jurisdiction in bringing these charges against him.”
“The charges stem from the chief justice’s January 2016 administrative order, which essentially said that the 2015 orders of the Alabama Supreme Court remained in effect until such time as the court said otherwise, and that the Alabama Supreme Court was reviewing the matter and would render an opinion.”
Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, said the six charges are “based on the JIC’s erroneous opinion that Chief Justice Moore should have told the probate judges to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.”
“Had he done so, he would have been in direct violation of the Alabama Supreme Court orders which were under review at that time,” Staver said.
“The JIC is wrong on the law and has no jurisdiction to render legal opinions anyway. How many times does the JIC need to be reminded that it is not a court of law? The Alabama Supreme Court has repeatedly slapped the JIC for wading into legal interpretations. If the JIC can takes sides on a legal interpretation, then every Alabama judge should be in fear that unelected people, some of whom are not attorneys, will stand in judgment of their legal reasoning. This would threaten the judiciary and give the JIC unprecedented authority to remove judges they do not like, which appears to be the case here. The JIC could care less about the rules. It violated the rule of confidentiality by leaking the matter to the media and it exceeded its own jurisdiction. We will get these frivolous charges dismissed,” said Staver.
The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper reported last weekend on a rally for Moore.
Dean Young, one of the rally speakers, described it as a war against the justice.
“Not only is it for the state of Alabama or the United States, but the entire world is watching to see what’s going to happen to a man who has stood for marriage being between a man and a woman,” he said.
The Advertiser said Mobile pastor Rusty Johnson “shared views similar to Young’s, stating that Moore’s supporters are locked in a spiritual war against a ‘militant homosexual movement and its demonic influences.’”
“I will never perform a ceremony of two men, and adult and a child or man and animal,” the pastor said.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled “same-sex marriage” is a constitutional right, Moore’s supporters point out that the minority in the decision argued the Constitution specifies that any issue it doesn’t mention is left to the states.
The grassroots group Sanctity of Marriage Alabama said the charges on which the state Judicial Inquiry Commission suspended Moore are “politically motivated complaints” and “unfounded charges.”
“Chief Justice Moore has violated no federal court order and has done nothing wrong,” said coalition spokesman Tom Ford. “The charges levied by the J.I.C. were the result of politically motivated complaints fueled by transvestite Ambrosia Starling and organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Human Rights Campaign out of hatred for God and morality. We find in the charges no basis for suspension or further review. All six charges should be immediately dropped and this political travesty be brought to a halt.”
The group argues Moore’s order fell within his administrative capacity as head of the judicial system and were in accord with the law in Alabama at that time.
Rally organizers note that the state Supreme Court did not rescind Moore’s orders.
“The charges are prefaced by nothing short of a witch hunt, and are an attempt to paint a factual administrative order as an ethics violation,” Ford said. “The J.I.C. has capitulated to the politically correct agenda of the radical left and has essentially communicated that a conflict with their ‘personal beliefs’ about marriage, the Constitution, or the scope of judicial review can result in ethics charges against any Alabama judge. This should concern all of us.”
Moore’s stance has drawn widespread support, including from a left-leaning New York Times columnist.
Emily Bazelon, founder of Slate’s women’s section, a Soros media fellow and a Yale graduate, in “In Sort-of-Defense of Roy Moore,” endorsed Moore’s argument that U.S. District Judge Callie Granade’s order not to enforce Alabama’s same-sex marriage ban didn’t require probate judges to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
In Alabama, voters by a margin of about 4-1 defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. But Granade ordered the creation of same-sex marriage.
Moore, however, pushed back, telling Alabama judges to follow their own state constitution. He also argued it was an infringement of state sovereignty, and there was no foundation in the U.S. Constitution giving the U.S. Supreme Court the authority to redefine marriage. And, he noted, state judges have a responsibility equal to federal courts to interpret the U.S. Constitution.
At the time, Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, who heads both the relief and development group Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, weighed in on the Alabama dispute.
His Facebook posting takes the dozens of orders from mostly federal judges across the country who have imposed same-sex marriage on populations that voted against the idea and puts them in perspective.
“No earthly court has jurisdiction over the infallible Word of God,” he said.
“I applaud Justice Moore and the many Alabama judges who are upholding the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman,” Graham said.
In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled only two years earlier that states have the power to define marriage.
And Ford, in a commentary, pointed out that both the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the federal court in Kansas “stated that the Obergefell (marriage) opinion ‘only invalidated laws in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee’ and did nothing to invalidate laws in their districts. In the same vein, Obergefell did not strike down the provisions of the Alabama Constitution.”
More than 60 legal scholars and attorneys recently championed that idea, saying: “The court’s majority opinion eschewed reliance on the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution, as well as the court’s own interpretative doctrines and precedents, and supplied no compelling reasoning to show why it is unjustified for the laws of the states to sustain marriage as it has been understood for millennia as the union of husband and wife.”
from PropagandaGuard https://propagandaguard.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/alabama-gop-sounds-off-on-chief-justice-roy-moore/
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