It's a little hard to reconcile the in-person Roy Moore with the Roy Moore of contemporary myth.
The reviled-by-some, adored-by-others "Ten Commandments judge" is personable to the max. His smile is broad and toothy; his face, at 59, still has echoes of the "aw, shucks" mischievous boy from Alabama's boondocks. Urbane, erudite, honorable, he's got charisma of rock-star proportions.
And then he starts preaching. Waving a book at me called Our Legal Heritage, he transforms himself into a self-appointed latter-day prophet thundering the will and wrath of the Lord.
"What changed my life," intones Moore, wielding the little book like a sword, "is when I went back and reviewed the history of the law in Western Civilization. ... It was all based upon God. ... There has to be some foundation, and it's always God. ... Law and scripture went hand and hand historically."
Given a chance, Moore intends to irrevocably rejoin those hands — ripped asunder, he says, by the evil forces of secularism.
And he has picked a helluva date for the reuniting ceremony: June 6, 2006. It's a portentous day for more than one reason. June 6 is the date of the primary election in which Moore will try to unseat a Republican incumbent governor, Bob Riley, a dull moderate who's managed to anger the state's conservative base over taxation.
The date has another, sulfuric-smelling meaning for those who, like Moore, chart their life's course with the Bible — or, at least, with their interpretation of scripture. Election Day is on the decidedly demonic 6/6/06. (If you don't get it, see Revelations 13:18.)
"That's a good thing," Moore muses at the beginning of a nearly day-long interview. Moore's spokesman, former talk-radio host J. Holland, adds: "To me, it's going to bear testament to a great day in Alabama politics when we elect a godly man who is very much Christ-like instead of anti-Christ, like a lot of the world is."
So, there we have it: Armageddon is just two months away, at least in Alabama. A vote for Moore is an endorsement of Jesus; a vote for Riley (or for one of the Democrats, an under-federal-indictment former governor, Don Siegelman; and Lucy Baxley, the lackluster current lieutenant governor) is a ballot cast for Old Scratch.
Right now, Riley has, depending on the poll, as much as a 2-to-1 lead over Moore. That's a reversal from a year ago, when Moore led. A February poll conducted for the Mobile Register gave Riley a landslide edge of 56 percent to 28 percent for Moore. The poll also predicted Riley trouncing either Democrat.
The media seem relieved at the thought of Moore taking a shellacking. The New York Times, in an article last month, declared Riley "handily in the lead."
But Moore is just swinging into action. He knows how to galvanize public attention — and he knows how to turn defeat into victory. Moreover, like other candidates whose base is the religious right — Ralph Reed, Christian Coalition sparkplug turned Georgia lieutenant governor aspirant, for example — Moore doesn't pay much attention to polls or the mainstream press. He told me over lunch at a Montgomery Mexican restaurant: "I go to the people. I go to them directly."
Interpreted, that means he relies on churches and on religious media to reach his bedrock constituency of fundamentalists. "There are more than enough people in Alabama who want a nation that goes back to our Christian roots to elect me," he says. The mainstream media "doesn't see these people."
And Alabama is not the only state facing a holy crusade. In Ohio, Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state accused by Democrats of rigging the 2004 election for George Bush, is another Christian soldier marching on a governor's mansion. In Tampa, county commissioners Ronda Storms and Brian Blair march in lockstep to the same anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-secularism tune that Moore whistles (see "Holy Rollover" sidebar).
Meanwhile, Christian Exodus, a group with ties to the racist League of the South, has developed a novel campaign strategy: It is encouraging the God-fearing to move multitudes of believers to South Carolina to stage a religious coup d'etat.
But Moore will be this year's headliner in the election holy wars. And his candidacy isn't just a 'Bama thang. It's part of a call to mix religion and government that's being heard throughout the South.
Moore began posting Ten Commandments in courtrooms in the early 1990s as a lower court judge. The American Civil Liberties Union sued him, and with the popularity gained from the litigation, Moore won the top seat on the Alabama Supreme Court.
He was ousted in November 2003 as chief justice after he issued a challenge designed to infuriate church-state separatists. On July 31, 2001, in the middle of the night — but with video cameras recording the event — he had his massive Ten Commandments memorial placed in the central rotunda of the state's Supreme Court building. It was a religious second Fort Sumter, signaling to the faithful the commencement of an ecclesiastical civil war.
