Christian Extremist Roy Moore Is Back

Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who gained notoriety for unsuccessfully defending a courthouse Commandments display, is supporting three protesters of a Hindu-led prayer given earlier this summer in the U.S. Senate. Those individuals, with ties to the stridently theocratic Operation Save America (OSA), were arrested after trying to shout down Rajan Zed, the Hindu chaplain. (Zed, a Reno resident was invited by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to open a Senate session with prayer.)

On July 12 as Zed was preparing to deliver his invocation, three protestors started shouting invective. “Lord Jesus, forgive us Father, for allowing a prayer of the wicked which is an abomination in your sight,” the protestors screamed from the Senate visitors’ gallery. Ante and Katherine Pavkovic and their daughter Christan were arrested and charged with disrupting Congress, a misdemeanor. They called themselves “Christian patriots,” and their actions were hailed by many Religious Right activists.

According to OSA, Moore is now coming to the support of the Pavkovic family and will apparently represent them Sept. 11 before the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The Rev. Flip Benham, OSA head, wrote earlier this week on the group’s Web site that Moore “has volunteered to come along side and represent these three Christians in court.” The trio, Benham alleges, are “on trial” for “praying in Jesus’ name in the chambers of the United States Senate.”

Christian Radical agitators, such as Benham and Moore, demand that government acknowledge and often promote only their fundamentalist religious beliefs. When the Senate announced its intent to open its door to a Hindu religious leader, the American Family Association went ballistic, firing off an e-mail to its supporters urging them to bombard senators with demands that they cancel the planned invocation.

The legal row that brought Moore hero-status within the Christian Radicals, centered on his desire to display a Commandments monument in the rotunda of Alabama’s Judicial Building. Moore and his representatives argued in the media and in court that judges have an obligation to honor Christianity. It reality, it was a symbol of the fundamentalist theocracy Moore and company would like to impose on America.

Moore’s arguments couldn’t persuade the conservative 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, and Moore was ousted from the bench after he refused to abide by the federal court’s order to remove the monument.

Nonetheless, Moore continues to promote the idea that the nation was founded on the Christian principles he espouses and that the Constitution does not prescribe the separation of church and state. (He did so most recently at a “God & Country” celebration in Severn, Md. in July.)

The former judge and many among the nation’s Religious Right are obsessed with government promotion of their religion. But when it comes to other faiths receiving even a smidgen of government acknowledgment, they lose it.

Moore, it seems, wants more fundamentalist Christianity in the public square and the right to slam other religions as “false” and shut them out of the public square.