Wednesday, July 26, 2006

WorldNutDaily adds "Fruit Salad" to its menu . . .

America's favourite theocrat Roy Moore has joined the conservative website WorldNetDaily. And right off the bat he establishes his theo-con credentials with a column calling for his country to "[acknowledge] the Judeo-Christian God as the sovereign source of our law, liberty and government."

Moore will be familiar to many readers as the Alabama judge who in 2001 defied a US Federal Court order to remove a granite display of the Ten Commandments which he had installed in the state judiciary building. He was subsequently removed from his position as Chief Justice by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. According to Moore:

I lost my position because I chose to follow God and the United States Constitution, our rule of law, instead of a federal judge's unlawful order [. . .].
According to the Presiding Judge, however, it was because he placed himself above the law. You see, Roy, "rule of law" refers to the law of the land, not (your fundamentalist interpretation of) Biblical law. As for the United States Consitution: (i) the word "God" (as TheocracyWatch helpfully points out) does not appear in it, but (ii) what the Constution definitely includes is the concept of church-state separation.

Moore goes on to make an appeal to tradition . . .
The whole history of our country is based on acknowledging God. Before they disembarked the Mayflower, the Pilgrims signed a compact in which they stated that they had undertaken the voyage to America "for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith."[. . .] Our forefathers knew what they were talking about [. . .].
. . . and concludes that "Nearly every issue and every problem we face in this country can be traced back to what kind of role we believe God plays in our society." Hurricane Katrina, for instance . . .

And then come the theo-conservative articles of faith. According to Moore, secularism is responsible for rising prison populations (because criminals can no longer "distinguish between right and wrong") and political corruption (*cough* former Republican House Majority Leader and felow fundamentalist Christian Tom Delay *cough*), and is also the reason that--get this--"our children are taught in our public schools that they are descended from monkeys." (The children! The children!) Actually, evolution does not suggest that "The children!" are descended from monkeys; rather it holds that the two species share an very distant common ancestor, and "The children!" in fact share more recent ancestry with chimpanzees and gorillas. Of course, Roy Moore grasps this perfectly, and when he claims that children in public schools are taught that they are descended from monkeys, he's only suggesting the possibility that some science educators might be guilty of misunderstanding evolutionary biology--a misunderstanding Moore does not himself share. Of course.

Oh yeah. He name-drops same-sex marriage and abortion, too. And all because the evil left-wing secularists and "courts gone out of control" have been hell-bent "on sandblasting all references to God from the public square." But don't fear: Roy's here.
My hope is that this weekly column will serve as a clarion call bringing readers back to first principles – God's moral principles – in discussing the current issues of the day. For it is only through recurrence to our moral foundation that this nation will stand firm in the tumultuous times ahead.
I can hardly wait.