Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was a guest on Eagle Forum Live over the weekend, where he discussed the recent developments in marriage equality with Anne Cori, Phyllis Schlafly’s daughter.
Moore seemed to be thrown a little off guard when a listener called in and asked angrily why “people use the 14th Amendment to protect interracial marriage when the authors of the 14th Amendment were against interracial marriage.” (The Supreme Court has found bans on both same-sex and interracial marriages to be violations of the 14th Amendment.)
Cori interrupted the caller and asked Moore to instead address people who say “you have to agree with same-sex marriage because interracial marriage is okay.”
The difference, Moore said, is that the right to the “pursuit of happiness” found in the Declaration of Independence came from God and God supports interracial marriage but not same-sex marriage.
“I think people today would say that same-sex marriage is a pursuit of happiness,” Cori interjected.
“Well, they would say that, but that’s not the way the laws of God define the pursuit of happiness,” Moore responded. “And pursuit of happiness was given by God and recognized by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia.”
Of course, interracial marriage opponents at the time were quite certain that God opposed interracial marriage, which had lower levels of public support at the time Loving was decided than same-sex marriage does today.
Correction: This post originally incorrectly referred to Cori as Schlafly's niece.
