Roy Moore Barred Queer Woman from Seeing Her Children Unsupervised

According to a new report in CNN, in 1996 Republican senate nominee Roy Moore barred a woman from seeing her kids because she had an affair with a woman.

Moore barred Suzanne Scott Borden from visiting her children without supervision because her “minor children will be detrimentally affected by [her] present lifestyle,” according to the report. Moore was eventually removed from the case because the woman and her lawyers argued that Moore’s anti-gay views meant he could not remain impartial, according to documents obtained by CNN.

Prior to his being removed from the case, Borden and her attorneys asked Moore to recuse himself because of his anti-gay beliefs. Her attorneys argued that his fundamentalist Christian beliefs gave him a “strong preconceived opinion of the Plaintiff because of her sexual orientation which would not leave the Court’s mind perfectly open to conviction and would render the Court unable to exercise his functions impartially in this particular case.”

In Moore’s original ruling, he wrote that Borden’s “homosexual relationship” was “forbidden both by the laws of the State of Alabama and the Laws of Nature.”
“Well, as you said, you know, homosexuality is against law,” Moore said, according to the court documents obtained by CNN. “Murder is against the law. I don’t recuse for every criminal that comes up, and I’m not comparing criminality with this conduct, but if somebody that commits a murder comes up before my court, I’m not going to recuse them, because that’s against what I believe, and it’s also against the law. Homosexuality is against the law. I can’t recuse, just because homosexuality is against the law.”

During the trial, Moore was being sued by the state’s ACLU because he publicly displayed the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

Moore has not evolved in his anti-gay views since then. Moore was suspended from the Alabama state court in 2016, and later removed, because he was set to enforce that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, even though that’s not how it was defined by law in the United States.

Moore is set to face Democrat Doug Jones for the Alabama senate seat left open by Jeff Sessions’ appointment to U.S. attorney general. Given that transgender woman Danica Roem was able to claim victory and oust a transphobic lawmaker from his seat, perhaps Moore should be worried.