Before Kim Davis, there was Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who invoked divine law in his effort to block his state from enforcing a pre-Obergefell federal court decision striking down its ban on same-sex marriage.
Moore ordered state probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, railing against the “rejection of God’s law by the federal judiciary” and insisting that “the laws of this state have always recognized the biblical admonition stated by our Lord.”
Moore was the keynote speaker at Eagle Council 2015, a St. Louis conference hosted by Phyllis Schlafly’s group Eagle Forum last week, where he naturally brought up Davis’ similar fight in Kentucky against marriage equality. The Alabama justice dedicated his entire speech to attacking the Obergefell decision and, like Davis’ lawyers, compared the clerk to victims of the Holocaust.
After reading Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came For The Socialists…,” Moore decided to write his own version in honor of Davis: “Ladies in gentlemen, we can say the same thing today. They came for the bakers, I didn’t bake cakes. They came for the florists, but I didn’t deal with flowers. They came for the little clerk down in Kentucky by the name of Kim Davis, but I’m not a clerk, I have nothing do with issuing licenses. Then they came for me, and nobody was left.”
“This will touch every person in this room, every child in this room eventually,” he said of Obergefell. “This opinion is not like other opinions that have been issued.”
