Will the “REAL” Roy Moore please stand up? Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court case, in 2002, in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where an expert witness on the separation of...

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court case, in 2002, in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case was testifying. Moore, then the state’s Chief Justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. When his “rock” was unveiled, Moore declared that the event, “... marked the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.” He, then, went on to refuse to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued by the Federal government for blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a “Christian nation.” One of his arguments was: “The founders were aware of no religion, other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.”

That statement was, of course, demonstrably and ridiculously a lie. But, that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation; as a constitutional authority, as a Southern Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years, that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom ONLY for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law, underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality and the truth.

In 2004, after Moore was removed from his position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (one of 2 times he was removed from the same office; the other for refusing to acknowledge gay marriage) for refusing to obey a Federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a “full-time martyr for the religious right,” he was visited by a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of their conversation, Moore launched into his falsehood about how “the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else.” (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

Playing with Moore’s logic, someone in the group postulated that another clause of the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press,” applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet. Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster saying that it was entirely plausible for that to be a valid argument.

Aside from his boasting about his ‘constitutional expertise,’ Moore also asserts that he is a Southern Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in ‘liberty of conscience’ and the ‘separation of church and state,’ which grew, in part, out of the Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded what’s now Rhode Island. Williams became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, advocating for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one, even dimly aware of Baptist heritage and tradition, should tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, “evangelical Christian values.” Aside from the sickening specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for helping “people in the margins,” those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could have the opportunity to grasp the first rungs of the ladder toward socio-economic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th and early 20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and his “religious right” followers. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project of himself, over the course of his career, as a constitutional authority, a devout Southern Baptist and a representative of evangelical values, is ludicrous, even to the point of being fraudulent and blasphemous. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter and Pharisee he is. I sincerely hope they have the scales removed from their eyes and see him for the con-man he really is.

Can you say, “shades of Trump?”

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

alabuck wrote:

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court case, in 2002, in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case was testifying. Moore, then the state’s Chief Justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. When his “rock” was unveiled, Moore declared that the event, “... marked the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.” He, then, went on to refuse to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued by the Federal government for blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a “Christian nation.” One of his arguments was: “The founders were aware of no religion, other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.”

That statement was, of course, demonstrably and ridiculously a lie. But, that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation; as a constitutional authority, as a Southern Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years, that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom ONLY for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law, underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality and the truth.

In 2004, after Moore was removed from his position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (one of 2 times he was removed from the same office; the other for refusing to acknowledge gay marriage) for refusing to obey a Federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a “full-time martyr for the religious right,” he was visited by a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of their conversation, Moore launched into his falsehood about how “the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else.” (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

Playing with Moore’s logic, someone in the group postulated that another clause of the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press,” applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet. Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster saying that it was entirely plausible for that to be a valid argument.

Aside from his boasting about his ‘constitutional expertise,’ Moore also asserts that he is a Southern Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in ‘liberty of conscience’ and the ‘separation of church and state,’ which grew, in part, out of the Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded what’s now Rhode Island. Williams became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, advocating for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one, even dimly aware of Baptist heritage and tradition, should tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, “evangelical Christian values.” Aside from the sickening specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for helping “people in the margins,” those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could have the opportunity to grasp the first rungs of the ladder toward socio-economic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th and early 20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and his “religious right” followers. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project of himself, over the course of his career, as a constitutional authority, a devout Southern Baptist and a representative of evangelical values, is ludicrous, even to the point of being fraudulent and blasphemous. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter and Pharisee he is. I sincerely hope they have the scales removed from their eyes and see him for the con-man he really is.

Can you say, “shades of Trump?”

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court cas... (show quote)

Shades of Trump

An outstanding post, Alabuck, as you continue to prove yourself to be one of the finest posters on OPP. The only fault I can find with your postings is the infrequency of them.

plainlogic

alabuck wrote:

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court case, in 2002, in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case was testifying. Moore, then the state’s Chief Justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. When his “rock” was unveiled, Moore declared that the event, “... marked the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.” He, then, went on to refuse to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued by the Federal government for blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a “Christian nation.” One of his arguments was: “The founders were aware of no religion, other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.”

That statement was, of course, demonstrably and ridiculously a lie. But, that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation; as a constitutional authority, as a Southern Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years, that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom ONLY for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law, underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality and the truth.

In 2004, after Moore was removed from his position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (one of 2 times he was removed from the same office; the other for refusing to acknowledge gay marriage) for refusing to obey a Federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a “full-time martyr for the religious right,” he was visited by a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of their conversation, Moore launched into his falsehood about how “the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else.” (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

Playing with Moore’s logic, someone in the group postulated that another clause of the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press,” applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet. Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster saying that it was entirely plausible for that to be a valid argument.

Aside from his boasting about his ‘constitutional expertise,’ Moore also asserts that he is a Southern Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in ‘liberty of conscience’ and the ‘separation of church and state,’ which grew, in part, out of the Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded what’s now Rhode Island. Williams became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, advocating for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one, even dimly aware of Baptist heritage and tradition, should tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, “evangelical Christian values.” Aside from the sickening specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for helping “people in the margins,” those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could have the opportunity to grasp the first rungs of the ladder toward socio-economic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th and early 20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and his “religious right” followers. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project of himself, over the course of his career, as a constitutional authority, a devout Southern Baptist and a representative of evangelical values, is ludicrous, even to the point of being fraudulent and blasphemous. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter and Pharisee he is. I sincerely hope they have the scales removed from their eyes and see him for the con-man he really is.

Can you say, “shades of Trump?”

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court cas... (show quote)

alabuck, C'mon man: Playing with Moore’s logic, someone in the group postulated that another clause of the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press,” applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet. Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster saying that it was entirely plausible for that to be a valid argument.

From this paragraph it's a fact there was no media other than News print. Now, comes the slammer. By you postulating that todays world has all new medias to be used, that, everything the constitution says is irrelevant; like Obama said: it's an old document and not relevant today.sic

So, the ACLU, Democrats and RINOS jump on board with P.C. and you have chaos in terminology, on laws, the Supreme Court interpretations. The Nation turned upside down with common sense a passé word, of meaning.

Oldsailor65 Loc: Iowa

plainlogic wrote:

alabuck, C'mon man: Playing with Moore’s logic, s... (show quote)

*******************************************************************
I live in Colorado and I would happily trade the citizens of Alabama:
1 Cory Gardner (Rino)
1 Gov. Hickenlooper (Demo)
1 Congresswoman Diana Degette (Demo)

all for 1 Roy Moore

PaulPisces Loc: San Francisco

plainlogic wrote:

alabuck, C'mon man: Playing with Moore’s logic, s... (show quote)

Your illogic is showing, PL! There is nothing in Alabuck's post that points in the direction of The Constitution being irrelevant. Please re-read their post. Perhaps several times.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

slatten49 wrote:

Shades of Trump

An outstanding post, Alabuck, as you continue to prove yourself to be one of the finest posters on OPP. The only fault I can find with your postings is the infrequency of them.

—————

Many thanks, kind Sir! I, too, would love to spend more time on the OPP. However, other items in life have cropped-up to occupy my time, causing me to not be logged-in as much as I’d love to be.

At present, I and Wifie are half-way through spending the month of November in Gulf Shores/Ft Morgan, Alabama. Pick any TV or talk radio station around here and the Roy Moore issue(s) are the dominant news story(íes), here. Additionally, my wife and I get a kick out of talking to the locals about their thoughts in Moore and the up-coming election. Thus far, it’s pretty evenly split between the 2 candidates, with The Democratic challenger, Doug Jones, having an ‘ever-so-narrow’ lead. Around L.A. (Lower Alabama), now-a-days, any lead by a Democrat, in an election, is a very big deal.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would vote to for Moore. I believe Moore could win the election simply because anyone running for office who claims to be a “patriotic American” and especially proclaims to be a “Christian,” will garner lots of votes, if, for no other reason, than by claiming his/her Christianity and then begins to tell the voters who/what they need to fear, without offering the 1st shread of proofa le evidence, and the voter will count that as a message from God, Himself, to vote for the “Christian,” no matter how bad their actions, present and/or past, may be or have been. Their ability to demonstrate just how willfully ignorant they are AND just how gullible they are when it comes to practible matters of their own faith. That an elected office seeker is shown to be the polar opposite of what they claim to be, seems to be of ZERO consequence when it come to party politics vs. religion (in this case, Christianity),as long as the person running for office “claims” to be a Christian.

Add to that, the “common knowledge” that Southern Baptist and Church of Christ preachers will threaten (While this isn’t supposed to occur, it’s very common knowledge in the Deep-Red, Deep-South, that politics are often the subject of the preachers’ sermon, especially preachers within the 2 fore-mentioned Christian denominations), with eternal damnation, for anyone who dares vote contrary to whom the preacher(s) “strongly suggests” them to vote for. After all, that well established “WAR” on Christianity is reaching a “high tide” in this country and if there were no Roy Moores to fight God’s battles for Him, Christianity, as we know it, will forever be lost to American citizens.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

Oldsailor65 wrote:

*******************************************************************
I live in Colorado and I would happily trade the citizens of Alabama:
1 Cory Gardner (Rino)
1 Gov. Hickenlooper (Demo)
1 Congresswoman Diana Degette (Demo)

all for 1 Roy Moore

—————-

If we stilled lived in Alabama, I’d let you HAVE Roy Moore, without you offering any “boot” to sweeten the deal. He’s a “losing hand” from the get-go! You’re, simply, too blind to see his true colors. If you REALLY like him, you two deserve one another!

PaulPisces Loc: San Francisco

alabuck wrote:

—————

Many thanks, kind Sir! I, too, would love to spend more time on the OPP. However, other items in life have cropped-up to occupy my time, causing me to not be logged-in as much as I’d love to be.

At present, I and Wifie are half-way through spending the month of November in Gulf Shores/Ft Morgan, Alabama. Pick any TV or talk radio station around here and the Roy Moore issue(s) are the dominant news story(íes), here. Additionally, my wife and I get a kick out of talking to the locals about their thoughts in Moore and the up-coming election. Thus far, it’s pretty evenly split between the 2 candidates, with The Democratic challenger, Doug Jones, having an ‘ever-so-narrow’ lead. Around L.A. (Lower Alabama), now-a-days, any lead by a Democrat, in an election, is a very big deal.

Personally, I can’t understand why anyone would vote to for Moore. I believe Moore could win the election simply because anyone running for office who claims to be a “patriotic American” and especially proclaims to be a “Christian,” will garner lots of votes, if, for no other reason, than by claiming his/her Christianity and then begins to tell the voters who/what they need to fear, without offering the 1st shread of proofa le evidence, and the voter will count that as a message from God, Himself, to vote for the “Christian,” no matter how bad their actions, present and/or past, may be or have been. Their ability to demonstrate just how willfully ignorant they are AND just how gullible they are when it comes to practible matters of their own faith. That an elected office seeker is shown to be the polar opposite of what they claim to be, seems to be of ZERO consequence when it come to party politics vs. religion (in this case, Christianity),as long as the person running for office “claims” to be a Christian.

Add to that, the “common knowledge” that Southern Baptist and Church of Christ preachers will threaten (While this isn’t supposed to occur, it’s very common knowledge in the Deep-Red, Deep-South, that politics are often the subject of the preachers’ sermon, especially preachers within the 2 fore-mentioned Christian denominations), with eternal damnation, for anyone who dares vote contrary to whom the preacher(s) “strongly suggests” them to vote for. After all, that well established “WAR” on Christianity is reaching a “high tide” in this country and if there were no Roy Moores to fight God’s battles for Him, Christianity, as we know it, will forever be lost to American citizens.

————— br br Many thanks, kind Sir! I, too, would ... (show quote)

Just be sure not to conflate "Church of Christ" with "United Church of Christ"!!!
They hate it when that happens, and they are very different indeed!

http://www.hrc.org/resources/stances-of-faiths-on-lgbt-issues-united-church-of-christ

http://www.churchofchrist-tl.org/basicBeliefs.html

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

PaulPisces wrote:

Just be sure not to conflate "Church of Christ" with "United Church of Christ"!!!
They hate it when that happens, and they are very different indeed!

http://www.hrc.org/resources/stances-of-faiths-on-lgbt-issues-united-church-of-christ

http://www.churchofchrist-tl.org/basicBeliefs.html

———————-
Paul,
As to myself, I am fully cognitive of the differences; which is why I omitted the word, ”United” in my original post. Many thanks, however, for the letting others know there’s a difference between the two.

Justsss Loc: Wisconsin

Alabuck, since you seem to hate Judge Roy Moore so much please enlighten me as to whom you voted for in 2016 ?
Thanks for your time.

ldsuttonjr Loc: ShangriLa

alabuck wrote:

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court case, in 2002, in a Montgomery, Ala., courtroom, where an expert witness on the separation of church and state in what came to be known as the Alabama Ten Commandments case was testifying. Moore, then the state’s Chief Justice, was the defendant. He had installed a granite block emblazoned with the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. When his “rock” was unveiled, Moore declared that the event, “... marked the restoration of the moral foundation of law to our people and the return to the knowledge of God in our land.” He, then, went on to refuse to allow any other religious representations in that public space.

“Roy’s Rock” represented a clear violation of the “Establishment Clause” of the First Amendment, and Moore was being sued by the Federal government for blatantly flouting the Constitution. He was silent that day in the courtroom, but he had already made a great deal of noise about the United States being a “Christian nation.” One of his arguments was: “The founders were aware of no religion, other than Christianity, and therefore, the First Amendment gave only Christians the right to free exercise.”

That statement was, of course, demonstrably and ridiculously a lie. But, that’s Roy Moore. The Republican Senate nominee has fashioned an entire career out of subterfuge and self-misrepresentation; as a constitutional authority, as a Southern Baptist and as a spokesman for evangelical values. The recent allegations of sexual misconduct, together with his many specious statements over the years, that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom ONLY for Christians, for example, or that many communities in the United States stagger under the burden of Islamic sharia law, underscore both his hypocrisy and his tenuous grasp of reality and the truth.

In 2004, after Moore was removed from his position as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (one of 2 times he was removed from the same office; the other for refusing to acknowledge gay marriage) for refusing to obey a Federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument and was touring as a “full-time martyr for the religious right,” he was visited by a group of students from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In the course of their conversation, Moore launched into his falsehood about how “the founders intended Christianity as the only constitutionally protected religion because they knew nothing else.” (The founders were most certainly aware of Jews and Muslims, who appear in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and in the Treaty of Tripoli as “Mussulmen,” the French term. That same treaty, negotiated by the John Adams administration and ratified unanimously by the Senate in 1797, states that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”)

Playing with Moore’s logic, someone in the group postulated that another clause of the First Amendment, the “freedom of the press,” applied only to newspapers and not to other media because the founders had no knowledge of radio, television or the Internet. Moore, rarely at a loss for words, was stumped for a moment, but he quickly regained his composure and resumed his bluster saying that it was entirely plausible for that to be a valid argument.

Aside from his boasting about his ‘constitutional expertise,’ Moore also asserts that he is a Southern Baptist. (He is a member of First Baptist Church in Gallant, Ala.) Once again, his behavior belies that claim. The Baptist tradition in America is marked by two characteristics. The first is that only adults and older children, not babies, may be baptized. The second is a belief in ‘liberty of conscience’ and the ‘separation of church and state,’ which grew, in part, out of the Baptists’ persecution as a minority in early America.

It was Roger Williams, a dissident Puritan who fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded what’s now Rhode Island. Williams became the founder of the Baptist tradition in America, advocating for dividing the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world” by means of a “wall of separation.” Jefferson, writing to the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., in 1802, employed the same metaphor to summarize his understanding of the First Amendment.

For Williams and his contemporaries, the “wilderness” was a place of darkness where evil lurked, so when Williams talked about a wall of separation to protect the garden from the wilderness, his concern was that the integrity of the faith would be compromised by too close an association with the state.

For more than three centuries, at least until the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1979, Baptists patrolled the wall of separation between church and state. Speaking at a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 1920, Baptist theologian George Washington Truett proudly declared that the separation of church and state was “preeminently a Baptist achievement.” He added that it was “the consistent and insistent contention of our Baptist people, always and everywhere, that religion must be forever voluntary and uncoerced, and that it is not the prerogative of any power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, to compel men to conform to any religious creed or form of worship.” Echoing Williams’s sentiments from several centuries earlier, Truett concluded that Christianity “needs no prop of any kind from any worldly source” and that any such support is a “millstone hanged about its neck.”

That washing-machine-size rock Moore unveiled in Alabama was a 5,280-pound millstone. No one, even dimly aware of Baptist heritage and tradition, should tolerate such chicanery because the confluence of church and state, as Williams warned, diminishes the faith and opens it to fetishization and trivialization.

Finally, Moore claims to represent “family values” and, more broadly, “evangelical Christian values.” Aside from the sickening specter of a 30-something Moore trolling shopping malls for teenage dates, Moore does not represent the evangelical movement he claims to. Historically, evangelicalism once stood for helping “people in the margins,” those Jesus called “the least of these.” Evangelicals in the 19th century advocated public education, so that children from less-affluent families could have the opportunity to grasp the first rungs of the ladder toward socio-economic stability. They worked for prison reform and the abolition of slavery. They advocated equal rights, including voting rights, for women and the rights of workers to organize. The agenda of 19th and early 20th-century evangelicals is a far cry from that of Moore and his “religious right” followers. I leave it to others to determine which version of “evangelical values” better comports with the words of Jesus, who instructed his followers to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and care for the needy.

The image that Moore has tried to project of himself, over the course of his career, as a constitutional authority, a devout Southern Baptist and a representative of evangelical values, is ludicrous, even to the point of being fraudulent and blasphemous. The voters of Alabama have the opportunity to unmask him as the imposter and Pharisee he is. I sincerely hope they have the scales removed from their eyes and see him for the con-man he really is.

Can you say, “shades of Trump?”

Roy Moore was participating in a Federal court cas... (show quote)

alabuck: Roy Moore is just not your kind of man.....Moore is a Constitutionist......I think that is above your pay grade?

ldsuttonjr Loc: ShangriLa

slatten49 wrote:

Shades of Trump

An outstanding post, Alabuck, as you continue to prove yourself to be one of the finest posters on OPP. The only fault I can find with your postings is the infrequency of them.

slatten49: I totally disagree with your logic!!!!!

slatten49 Loc: Lake Whitney, Texas

ldsuttonjr wrote:

slatten49: I totally disagree with your logic!!!!!

I accept that. But, insofar as Moore being a 'Constitutionalist,' the post clearly explains why he is not...except by his own interpretation.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

Justsss wrote:

Alabuck, since you seem to hate Judge Roy Moore so much please enlighten me as to whom you voted for in 2016 ?
Thanks for your time.

——————

Who I “voted for?!” Voted for which elected offices? If you're hinting around to learn for whom I voted for POTUS, I, proudly, voted for HRC. But, what has that to do with this Alabama election? I vote for the person, not the party. Always have, always will. BTW, I’m a registered Republican.

Also, I don’t “hate” Roy Moore. I, simply, don’t like him, nor his pronouncements regarding the “separation of church and state” and his stance on homosexuality. He may cliam to be a “Christian,” but his actions and words show a man, totally opposite to how I define a “Christian” should talk and act. I see him as much of a con-man as I see Trump as one.

Take the time to fully investigate Moore’s history, both public and private. You might be surprised as to just how much of a phony he really is.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

ldsuttonjr wrote:

alabuck: Roy Moore is just not your kind of man.....Moore is a Constitutionist......I think that is above your pay grade?

———————
ld,
Roy Moore wouldn’t know the Constitution if it hit him in his face. Did you even read my OP? If you had, you’d see where his views on the 1st Amendment are in direct conflict with what the Constitution says. Besides that, his views follow the old “nullification theory” of John C. Calhoun, from the early 1800’s.

The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution states that:

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Additionally, the practical legality of nullification was decided between 1861-1865.

Understanding the Constitution is NOT above anyone’s pay grade. Each of us needs to know and understand it so we can be better citizens and not be led around by our noses by charlitians and crooks who know how to place blame but not provide good and reasonable answers and solutions to our problems.

Now, put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.