WASHINGTON (ABP) — Roy Moore's long legal saga over the Ten Commandments, which began with a bang, has ended in a whimper.
The U.S. Supreme Court, beginning its 2004-2005 term Oct. 4, declined without comment to hear Moore's appeal of an Alabama judicial panel's ruling that cost him his job as the state's chief justice.
The court's decision not to hear Moore's appeal means that the former judge has exhausted his last legal option in the case. However, nothing in Alabama law prevents him from running for the same office again in 2006, when the current chief justice's term expires. State opinion polls at the height of the controversy in 2003 showed that a large majority of Alabamians supported Moore's position.
Last April, the Alabama Supreme Court removed Moore from office permanently. A few months earlier, a state judicial panel had ousted him for ethical violations due to his behavior in the summer of 2003.
In August, he made national headlines for defying a federal court's order to remove a two-ton granite monument to the Protestant translation of the commandments from the state judicial headquarters building in Montgomery.
Moore had placed the monument at the center of the building's rotunda in 2001, shortly after he was elected on a campaign of support for such displays. He did so without the knowledge or permission of his fellow justices on the Alabama Supreme Court.
Moore had claimed that he placed the monument because the Alabama and federal constitutions required him to “acknowledge God.” A coalition of civil-liberties groups sued Moore for violating the First Amendment's ban on state establishment of religion, and U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson agreed, ordering the monument's removal. A federal appeals court upheld Thompson's ruling, and the Supreme Court later declined to hear Moore's appeal of that ruling.
In appealing to the nation's highest court on the issue of reinstatement to his former office, Moore's attorneys had argued the Alabama panels that ousted him subjected him to an “unconstitutional religious test” because the monument was an expression of his faith.
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