Is There Hope for Our Judiciary? Yes, Says "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore

(EXCLUSIVE TO CHALCEDON)

A federal judge rules the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

Supreme Court justices invent a new “right” of sodomy, expand the concept of eminent domain to allow government to condemn private property and give it to another private owner, and blithely insist that foreign laws may be used as a basis for American court decisions.

John Roberts, chosen to succeed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice, deftly parries senators’ questions and leaves much of the country wondering where he stands on controversial legal issues.

If you’re thinking this is an America with an out-of-control judiciary that can’t be restored to its proper function — think again, says Judge Roy Moore.

Moore became nationally famous two years ago when he was ousted from his post as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to obey a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse. If anyone has a right to be pessimistic about the future of the judiciary, you’d think it would be Roy Moore. But he isn’t.

“God can turn this around,” he told Chalcedon, “and He will, if we keep putting the truth out there.”

Signs of Hope

Since being ejected from office, Moore has set up the Foundation for Moral Law (morallaw.org), which files briefs in court cases concerning the public display of the Ten Commandments and other First Amendment issues. The foundation is also preparing to hold seminars that will teach judges, lawyers, and law students about Biblical Law as the basis of America’s laws and Constitution.

“There is a lot more being written and said about this than there was a few years ago,” Moore said. “The truth that’s been cut off for so long is being brought out into the open, and it will prevail.”

In his now-frequent travels to promote his message, Moore said, he has seen signs of “judges waking up all over the country.

“I had lunch the other day with a circuit court judge in Illinois — a godly man, but a man who hadn’t been taught properly. He was really interested in these things [God’s Word as the source of law], and he wasn’t backing away when I started talking about them. He wanted to learn a better way.

“As Thomas Jefferson said, truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error. And now the truth is getting out.”

The Root of the Problem

How did our judicial system come to the point where federal judges proclaim that morality can no longer be a basis for law, but questionable or even absurd rulings from the past can never be overturned because they’ve become “settled law”?

“What’s going on here is a denial of God by the same people who open their courts by saying, ‘God bless this honorable court,’” Moore said. “The judges, the law schools, the legislators, and much of the public have lost the basic understanding of what law is.”

The Declaration of Independence — “which is our organic law” he said — founded our country on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Behind the Declaration stands Blackstone’s Commentaries, described in American court rulings as late as 1993 as an authoritative “summation of the common law.”

And behind Blackstone stands the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments and the Books of the Law.

“These are the foundations of our law,” Moore said. “Modern law professors and judges have distanced themselves from these foundations.

“You have to come to an understanding of what God means by law. Our founders had a very clear understanding of that. Today we don’t. And when you depart from that standard, you’re lost. All you have left is a judge’s personal opinion.”

Today’s judges and lawyers have cut themselves off from God’s laws, from the English common law, and from America’s founding documents and the clear intent of the founders as revealed in their many writings, including the Federalist Papers (by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay). The practical result of this separation of the legal profession from the law’s foundation became visible during John Roberts’ confirmation hearings.

Before a national television audience, Judge Roberts fended off questions by senators trying to find out where he stood on overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established a Constitutional “right” to abortion.

“Our whole concept of precedent today is wrong,” Moore said. “We’ve been taught that whatever a judge says is the law, and that’s not true.”

During the inconclusive exchanges between Roberts and the senators, both sides spoke of Roe v. Wade in terms of “precedent” and “settled law.” But neither side used the words as legal history and Blackstone define them, Moore said.

Precedent binds judges except “where the former determination is most evidently contrary to reason, and much more if it be contrary to revealed divine law,” he quoted from Blackstone (Commentaries 1:69; emphasis added). If a former decision is “manifestly absurd or unjust,” he said, “then the ruling ought to be overturned — not because it was bad law, but because it was not law at all!

“Precedent is only binding when it comports to the written laws — the laws that are in our Constitution or passed by our legislatures — and don’t contradict the divine law.”

Can We Do Better?

The failure to grasp and apply the true meaning of precedent is only one of many symptoms of a general misunderstanding of the law by law professionals, Moore said.

“The problem is that the pool you go to, to find judges, is severely tainted,” he said. “They’ve not been taught what ‘the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’ means.

“The Constitution does not address our morality — the definition of marriage, for instance, and the laws governing marriage. This is all contained in the common law, which is based on moral precepts found in the Bible. Our national morality is contained in the laws regarding marriage. And don’t think you can have morality without it. We now have judges who don’t understand that.”

Turning the selection of federal judges into a contest of political power, Moore said, has only resulted in people expecting the winning nominees to be “conservative,” and being disappointed in the results.

“They get so caught up in winning, they put politics and power over principle, and they’re deceived. A bunch of conservative religious leaders get together and say, ‘Oh, this is a good nominee, because so-and-so says he is. Let’s get our people to support him.’

“That’s how you wind up with a ‘conservative’ judge who says, ‘I believe in a Constitutional right to privacy.’ Well, where the heck did he find it? Not in the Constitution!”

But Christian citizens don’t have to go to law school or be elected to Congress to understand the need for judicial reform and help to bring it about, Moore said.

“You have to come to an understanding of what God means by law,” he said. “You won’t find it in a law school or in Congress. You’ll find it in the Bible, in the Declaration of Independence, and in the writings of our country’s founders. And most of it is just common sense.”

More and more, he said, the American people are demanding godly judges who respect the Constitution and rule according to the law, not their personal opinions. This demand was not being heard ten years ago.

“Time is on our side,” Judge Moore said. “The more we proclaim the truth, the stronger it gets.”