Contributors

Monday, November 13, 2017

Will Alabama Sell Its Soul to the Devil?

Today Mitch McConnell -- Republican Senate majority leader -- called on Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for an empty Alabama Senate seat in a special election to be held next month, to leave the race. The head of the Republican Senate campaign committee called upon the Senate to expel Moore should he win.

Today George F. Will, the crotchety arch-conservative eminence, endorsed Moore's opponent, a Democrat with a history of supporting unions and prosecuting civil rights cases, including convictions of two men who bombed a church 40 years earlier, killing four black girls.

Today a fifth woman accused Moore of attacking her when she was a sixteen-year-old waitress:
“I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch,” Ms. Nelson said in a statement she issued at the news conference. She said Mr. Moore warned her that “no one will believe you” if she told anyone about the encounter in his car.
Two days ago one of Moore's former colleagues said everyone knew that the 30-something Moore had a fondness for jail bait:
"It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird," former deputy district attorney Teresa Jones told CNN in comments aired Saturday. "We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall ... but you really wouldn't say anything to someone like that."
The vast majority of Alabama voters are Christians, many of them evangelicals and Baptists. The state went for Trump in a big way, even though he openly bragged about forcing himself on women, and more than a dozen women confirmed that Trump's bragging was true.

Republicans and the religious right used to claim that character counts and morality matters. But when their candidates prove to be liars, womanizers and sexual predators, they no longer believe that criminal sexual behavior matters.

It should be clear to everyone that politicians like Moore and Trump, who trumpet the Bible but ignore its rules, are totally lacking any sort of morality and common decency. They're just con men mouthing the lies they think the voters want to hear. These liars are ridiculing the intelligence of Alabama voters.

Democrats and liberals have accepted the validity of allegations of sexual harassment against numerous media and Hollywood types, most of whom have lost their jobs and lucrative deals. After Fox News paid more than $100 million in settlements for similar allegations, why do Republicans insist that "their guys" are innocent? It's clear that sexual harassment has nothing to do with political affiliation: it's a power trip for men who think they can grab and bang whoever they want.

If Republicans are willing to accept the word of Weinstein's accusers at face value without a trial or due process, they have have to accept the accusations of Moore's victims.

Critics of the religious right have long believed that the Moralizing Majority were nothing but a lying bunch of hypocrites. Will Alabama prove them right by electing Moore?

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