The Christian Extremists Behind Roy Moore.


Right Wing Watch has a comprehensive rundown of all those backing Roy Moore. In case you don’t remember Moore, here are two posts from last year, when Moore made a mess of his career at the time: one, two. Now that Moore is running for a senate seat, the religious reich is fervently backing him.

…Some better-known Religious Right groups, including the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, have recently gone all-in for Moore. He has also been getting serious financial support in the form of outside spending from groups like Ken Cuccinelli’s Senate Conservatives Fund and from Alabama activist Stan Pate, who has been funding ads attacking Strange.

And Moore has also quietly been getting support from some of his most extreme allies, who see him as a chance to give their Christian nationalists views the biggest megaphone yet:

Michael Peroutka is a local Republican politician in Maryland who has used wealth from a set of debt-collection businesses to bankroll Christian nationalist causes across the country, most notably by funding the career of Moore. Peroutka has funded Moore’s Christian nationalist ventures and political campaigns for decades; he gave Moore’s Senate campaign $2,500 in June and his wife Natalie gave the same amount in early August, each nearly maxing out on their individual contribution limit for the initial Republican primary.

Peroutka is a former member of the neo-Confederate League of the South—he quit when the association started to cause him trouble in his campaign for office. As recently as 2012, he was on video leading a League of the South gathering in a round of “Dixie,” which he calls the “national anthem”; in a 2004 speech to the group, he said he was “still angry” that Maryland didn’t join the Confederacy and said that his daughter had the nickname “Beth Booth,” as in “John Wilkes Booth.”

Peroutka, who runs a group called the Institute on the Constitution, advocates an extreme form of Christian nationalism, saying for instance that the Maryland legislature had ceased to be a legitimate governing body when it violated “God’s law” by passing a marriage equality bill. Last year, he presented on his theocratic view of the law to Operation Save America, an extreme anti-choice group that is trying to get government officials to defy laws on abortion rights and ultimately charge women who have abortions with homicide. (OSA has its own relationship with Moore, which we discuss below.) Along with his longtime support for Moore, Peroutka has helped to fund the campaigns of Tom Parker, Moore’s protégé on the Alabama Supreme Court, who has been trying to establish a legal framework for extreme anti-choice “personhood” laws.

Rusty Thomas, the head of the extreme anti-choice group Operation Save America, contributedjust over $200 to Moore’s campaign in three separate contributions in July and August. Although Thomas’ financial contribution is relatively small, he has been a stalwart ally to Moore throughout his tribulations on the Alabama Supreme Court.

In the summer of 2015, as Moore attempted to fight the Supreme Court’s landmark marriage equality decision, he accepted an award from OSA at the group’s gathering in Montgomery, telling them that “America is under attack” as it moves away from God and adding, “I’m sorry but this country was not founded on Muhammad. It was not founded on Buddha. It was not founded on secular humanism. It was founded on God.”

Moore responded to criticism of his association with OSA by saying: “You know, some told me ‘you know they’re a radical group.’ I said yeah. They are radical for God.”

Like Peroutka, Thomas and OSA promote the theocratic worldview that laws that they perceive to be ungodly are null and void. OSA’s main text for this belief is a book called “The Doctrine of Lesser Magistrates” by OSA activist Matt Trewhella, one of the anti-choice radicals who signed a statement in the 1990s declaring the murder of abortion providers to be justifiable homicide; in presenting the award to Moore in 2015, Thomas prayed that God would use him to “set an example for lesser magistrates throughout the United States of America that it’s time to say no to the federal beast!”

That’s just a little bit. There’s video, many links, and background on these supporters, including Anita and Mat Staver, Steve Hotze, Ken Eldred, and Eugene Delgaudio at RWW. I think a bit of fear is setting into the religious reich at this point, about how long they may have their stooge in office. Their efforts are seriously ramping up when it comes to getting as many religious reich fanatics as possible into government positions.

Comments

  1. johnson catman says

    The only kind of religious freedom that bigots like Moore want are HIS freedom to impose HIS religion on everyone else. Fuck him and all his ilk.

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