Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore
on Friday reiterated his opposition to the Supreme Court's finding
that gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry.
With a one-sentence ruling, the Alabama
Supreme Court dismissed a set of petitions asking the court to
enforce the state's ban on gay unions: “IT IS ORDERED that all
pending motions and petitions are DISMISSED.”
Susan Watson, executive director of the
American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, told The
Washington Post that in dismissing the petitions the justices
had realized “that the U.S. Supreme Court decision holds and that's
the law of the land.”
But it took the court 170 pages to
explain its conclusion. For his part, Moore wrote a colorful 94-page
concurring opinion, in which he claimed that the Supreme Court had
overstepped its bounds in the case.
“The opinion appeals more to emotion
than law, reminding one of the 1974 song Feelings by Morris
Albert, which begins: 'Feelings, nothing more than feelings …,'”
Moore
wrote. “The Court's opinion speaks repeatedly of homosexuals
being humiliated, demeaned, and denied 'equal dignity' by a state's
refusal to issue them marriage licenses. The majority seeks to
invoke the grief, sorrow, and compassion associated with a Greek
tragedy. Riding a tidal wave of emotion, the ensuring tears and
pathos then suffice to fertilize a new constitutional right nowhere
mentioned in the Constitution itself.”
“The Obergefell majority's
theory of constitutional law also overlooks the reality that the
purpose of law is to restrain behavior for the public good. …
Sodomy has never been and never will be an act by which a marriage
can be consummated,” he added.
Groups seeking to undermine the high
court's ruling greeted Friday's decision as a victory because it left
untouched a March 2015 order, which held that under the U.S.
Constitution a state is not required to recognize the marriages of
gay and lesbian couples.
Mat Staver, chairman of the Christian
conservative Liberty Counsel, called the ruling a “stamp of
approval” on that March order.