Roy Moore: Marriage Equality Worse Than Ruling Upholding Slavery

Senate candidate Roy Moore said that the 1857 Dredd Scott ruling codifying slavery in the United States was not as detrimental as the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling that legalized marriage equality nationwide.

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The former Alabama chief justice -- twice fired and removed from the bench -- made the comparison on the Here I Stand podcast in November, reports Talking Points Memo.

"In 1857 the United States Supreme Court did rule that black people were property. Of course that contradicted the Constitution, and it took a civil war to overturn it. But this ruling in Obergefell is even worse in a sense because it forces not only people to recognize marriage other than the institution ordained of God and recognized by nearly every state in the union, it says that you now must do away with the definition of marriage and make it between two persons of the same gender or leading on, as one of the dissenting justices said, to polygamy, to multi-partner marriages. We've got to go back and recognize that what they did in Obergefell was not only to take and create a right that does not exist under the Constitution but then to mandate that that right compels Christians to give up their religious freedom and liberty."

Moore gave the interview after being suspended from the bench for instructing Alabama probate justices to not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The directive was in direct violation of the Supreme Court ruling, and Moore was fired for his actions. Moore previously served as Alabama chief justice a decade and a half earlier, but was removed in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments plaque from the state judicial building.

Moore is currently running to replace Jeff Sessions -- the current attorney general -- in the Senate; in September, Moore defeated Luther Strange in the primary and is now facing civil rights lawyer Doug Jones in the December 12 election. Should Moore win, he will be the Senate's most extreme anti-LGBT member.