Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore said the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage was “even worse” than the Dred Scott ruling that upheld slavery, according to a resurfaced interview he gave in 2016.
“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,” Moore said on the Christian Emergency League’s Here I Stand podcast in November, according to Talking Points Memo.
“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,” he continued.
In Obergefell, the Supreme Court found that it was a fundamental right under the U.S. Constitution to allow homosexual couples to marry.
Dred Scott was the case in which an enslaved African-American man was held not to be a citizen and, therefore, could not sue for his freedom.
Moore, who is vying for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vacated Senate seat in the Dec. 12 special election, was previously a judge on the Alabama Supreme Court before he was removed from office in 2003 for failing to follow a federal court order that directed him to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments in the state’s judicial building.
He was then re-elected to the bench in 2013, but was suspended in 2016 for requiring probate judges to continue to enforce Alabama’s ban on gay marriage.
This is not the first time Moore has commented on same-sex relationships. In a 2005 interview, he told CSPAN that “homosexual conduct should be illegal.”
