Now that we can breathe a sigh of relief that Roy Moore will not be elected as a Senator from Alabama, I would like to register a dissent from the general consensus about what was the very worst thing about him.
Take two things that we know about Roy Moore. One was that he pursued and dated 16-year-olds when he was in his thirties. He disputes some of the worst allegations - that he had sexual contact with a 14-year-old, and that he tried in one case to force himself on a 16-year-old — and even though I'm inclined to believe his accusers, in the interest of fairness I wouldn't say that these are things that we know he did. But as for dating 16-year-olds generally, his behavior has been corroborated by multiple accusers, and he all but admitted it when the issue was first raised.
A second thing we know about Roy Moore was that when he was the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he issued a ruling against a lesbian woman in a custody case, in which he wrote these words:
"Homosexual conduct is, and has been, considered abhorrent, immoral, detestable, a crime against nature, and a violation of the laws of nature and of nature’s God... It is an inherent evil against which children must be protected."
Of these two things that we know about Moore, I'd estimate that in the run-up to the election, about 100 times as many articles have been written about the first as about the second. Part of that was due to the ongoing investigation into the allegations, as well as the fact that they were guaranteed more coverage because they were new - but, let's face it, the overwhelming impression you'd get from the headlines is that his pursuit of 16-year-olds was a much bigger scandal than the absolutely horrible things he wrote about gay people.
Well, look. Neither one is something to be proud of. But the age of consent in Alabama was (and still is) 16. Legally, in this case, chasing after 16-year-olds is what people think chasing after 18-year-olds is — not exactly dignified, but it's the minimum age to make the relationship legal.
On the other hand, using the power of the state not just to discriminate against gay people, but to say pretty much the ugliest things about them that he could come up with, should be beyond joking about. It's that kind of environment that drives gay teenagers to suicide, that reinforces people's prejudices, that prevents healing in families where half of the family has disowned a member who came out as gay. It would be bad enough for Moore to write these words as a private citizen — to do it as a representative of the legal system was abominable.
Because Moore was the candidate who did both of these things, it made it easy for anyone with an ounce of common sense to vote against him. But imagine if a candidate who had dated (legal) 16-year-olds in his thirties ran against a candidate who wrote a vicious diatribe against gay people into an official state Supreme Court ruling. I'd vote for the cheerleader-chaser in a second. No, I wouldn't even vote for a write-in candidate in order to feel "morally clean." I'd vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the raging anti-gay bigot because the top priority should be to keep a person like that out of office before they do any more harm.
So I think the media got it wrong. When a candidate for the Senate is capable of authoring a legal opinion with such viciously ugly statements about gay people, we should consistently call that out as the worst thing about them.
