Moore: 'I've kept my oath'
 |
Roy Moore
Story Tools
VIDEO
|
Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore tells CNN's Soledad O'Brien why he won't remove the Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building.
|
|
MONTGOMERY, Alabama (CNN) -- Suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore offers no apology for defying a federal court order to remove a massive Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building's rotunda.
"I've kept my oath. I have acknowledged God as the moral foundation of our law," Moore told cheering supporters outside the building Monday afternoon.
Moore argues that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of the U.S. legal system and that forbidding the acknowledgment of the Judeo-Christian God violates the First Amendment.
"It's not about a monument," he said. "It's not about religion. It's about the acknowledgment of almighty God," he said.
Moore has long been of the mind that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and just about every other law on the books first came from the creator.
Moore's own roots suggest he was taught these beliefs from a very early age.
From a working-class home in rural Etowah County, Alabama, Moore earned an appointment to West Point in 1965.
He later served as a military policeman in Vietnam, where being a stickler for constant salutes and regulation haircuts in the midst of war almost made him a target of the men under him.
"His policies damn near got him killed in Vietnam," Barrey Hall, who served under Moore, told The Associated Press. "He was a strutter."
After he returned home and graduated from law school in 1977, he landed a job as an assistant district attorney in Etowah County -- but resigned in 1982 after losing an election for circuit court judge.
Moore moved to Texas where he trained as a full-contact karate fighter. He later spent several months in the Australian outback, wrangling wild cattle.
He returned to Alabama to resume his legal career in 1992, becoming a circuit-court judge in Gadsden.
It was in that position, that Roy Moore became known as the "Ten Commandments judge" -- a title he's embraced.
"I will never, never deny the God upon whom our laws in our country depend," he said on August 21.
Moore hand-carved a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments -- and placed it on his courtroom wall.
A legal firestorm ensued and in 1997, a federal judge ordered him to remove it. Moore refused to obey.
Alabama's governor intervened and the plaque stayed in place.
After Moore campaigned as the "Ten Commandments Judge" and won the election to become chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he had a monument of the commandment scroll – weighing more than two and a half tons – placed in the rotunda of the justice building in 2001.
That very summer, activists were locked out of the judicial building after trying to place a display of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech next to the monument.
Having lost two federal court rulings, having the U.S. Supreme Court refuse to stay those rulings and having his fellow state justices vote to remove the statue -- Moore finds himself under suspension, but still fighting.
Copyright 2004 CNN. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
