Roy Moore Thinks Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Was 'Even Worse' Than Supreme Court Decision Upholding Slavery

By now it’s quite clear that Roy Moore, the GOP’s candidate to fill Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat, considers LGBTQ rights a mortal sin. But Moore’s contempt for the LGBTQ community, which was already appalling, reached a new low last November when he claimed the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage, Obergefell, was “even worse” than its 1857 decision upholding slavery, Dred Scott.

During an interview with a podcast hosted by the Christian Emergency League, an evangelical nonprofit dedicated to promoting “religious freedom,” Moore argued that Obergefell was more of an abomination to American history than Dred Scott because the decision apparently “nullified” marriage’s definition.

Behold, Moore’s unconscionably bigoted opinion, per Talking Points Memo (emphasis mine):

“In 1857 the United States Supreme Court did rule that black people were property. Of course that contradicted the Constitution, and it took a civil war to overturn it. But this ruling in Obergefell is even worse in a sense because it forces not only people to recognize marriage other than the institution ordained of God and recognized by nearly every state in the union, it says that you now must do away with the definition of marriage and make it between two persons of the same gender or leading on, as one of the dissenting justices said, to polygamy, to multi-partner marriages.”

Moore went on to suggest that Obergefell somehow forced Christians to relinquish their religious rights — a familiar assertion in the religious right’s toxic arsenal. “We’ve got to go back and recognize that what they did in Obergefell was not only to take and create a right that does not exist under the Constitution but then to mandate that that right compels Christians to give up their religious freedom and liberty,” he so abhorrently claimed.

Before dropping in on the wave of populism that has swept the American political landscape, Moore infamously refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. He was removed as the Chief Justice on Alabama’s Supreme Court in 2016 for his defiance of the higher court’s decision. Before that, Moore was again removed from his judicial position when he refused to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from Alabama’s Supreme Court building.

Despite his Steve Bannon-backed momentum, Moore’s lead in the Senate race is far from secured. A recent Fox News poll somewhat surprisingly indicated he was tied with Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate.