The State

Shall We Judge Roy Moore?

Rev. Steve Schlissel - December 11, 2017

Dear Christian Voters of Alabama,

Greetings in our Messiah. I apologize for sending this Part 2 of 2 to you so close to the day of your vote, but the truth is, each time I sat down to compose it, I became distraught. I tried to provide helpful perspectives which make clear why it’s a net-net/no-brainer to support and vote for Roy Moore to fill the senate seat formerly occupied by now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But, speaking of sessions, each time I engaged with the topic, the illogical, irrational, disingenuous and/or embarrassing excuses to reject Judge Roy Moore started clamoring for attention, leaving my original simplicity looking anemic or inadequate.

Consider, for example, Thursday’s WSJ tirade against Brother Moore. It is the perfect example of debilitated, RINO, “conservative” thinking, and that last word really doesn’t even apply. The Journal piece concedes that trial by newspaper is distasteful and ought to be avoided. It acknowledges that the 40-year-old expiration date on the complaints is significant. But, say they, “there are strong moral and practical reasons to reject Mr. Moore.” After reading it, I wondered why they didn’t provide any.

Listen, please: the opposition to Roy Moore that I’ve seen is all connected to the positions he was known for prior to winning the Republican nomination. There is not a single cogent position against him relying on the gossip. It seems all that dastardly effort did was provide faux cover for people who dislike fundamental tenets of Christianity and certain facts of American history. For them, adopting the baseless and empty rhetoric which has them horrified at his non-deeds allows them to imagine that their disloyalty and their falsehoods emanate from some high moral perch.

They don’t.

You want to talk about practical concerns? I have one. If these bottom feeders succeed in their Alabama wool-pulling, you may be certain that in every future campaign for elective office in which an unashamed Christian American runs as an unashamed Christian American, there will be this brazen trolling for dirt, there will be the journalistic “want ads” soliciting filth they can artfully dress as “news,” and the phony melding of isolated events of uncertain character into a public cyphering which won’t stop until enough voters reckon zero + zero + zero equals three—and “Three’s the charm.”

It was especially distressing to hear Christians who have bought wholesale into a practice born out of the gliberal worldview. What practice? The one in which violations of their Leftist Commandments result in the violator’s ontological reassignment. The meaning of this is important, so bear with me. It is best seen by comparing systems.

Christians recognize we are all sinners. Christians recognize that sinners’ sin. But we also know the grace of God, that grace which can and often does lead sinners to repentance. The Bible is extremely clear about this. Paul, in one place, lists many kinds of sinners, sinners who embody assorted evils—he mentions idolaters, thieves, male prostitutes, homosexuals, drunkards, the greedy and slanderers and more. But then he says, “Such were some of you.” You are not such any longer! Yes, even homosexuals and idolaters can be transformed. Through faith in, and repentance toward, Jesus Christ they (and we) become new creations. They were washed, St. Paul explains: sanctified and justified. Jesus is also very emphatic in demanding that we believe and own this truth: “Do not,” He warned, “call unclean that which I have (cleansed and) made clean.” We know that true repentance is not a function of lip but of life, therefore we look for changed lives from those who were sinners but want to be right with God.

Unbelief knows nothing of this whole world. They know nothing of God’s righteousness (or rather, they know it, hate it and therefore fight it and deny it). Neither do they see or grasp His mercy. I beg you to notice how, when they go after someone, if they can convince people that ‘Person X’ violated one of their many unpardonables (which change favored victims like Baskin Robbins changes its flavor of the month), they feel their job is done. There’s nothing more to do. Once they have put a person in their ontological box, there is (to their minds) no escape. “He IS a deplorable. She IS a racist, etc.”

Redemption simply does not factor in to the leftists’ view of things. Christians live gratefully because of it, in terms of responsibilities rather than entitlements. Conservatives can reason toward improvements. But redemption and reason are not prominent for NYTwits (those whose thought is anchored in the drivel of the New York Times).

That is why you’ll hear them flippantly condemn vast swathes of people based not upon what the people have done, but by what Leftist ideology holds those people to be. It is the same idea which lies behind hate crimes as a distinct category. You’d think the fact that a guy murders you is hate enough. But no, if he did it with full recognition of the magical group you belonged to, well, that’s a real crime. This is, of course, in league with their belief that gender is not objective (a direct consequence of atheism). It can only be objective if there is a Sovereign Determiner. Denying Him now means everyone must be put on hold until they are informed what gender category a person has chosen.

The Bible teaches us that a man can hardly be confident he knows himself (Jer. 17:9), let alone all others! Yet the state of affairs ushered in for us by NYTwits imagines an elite able to peer into others’ hearts, yet at the same time, they cannot tell boys from girls. Talk about the blind leading the blind! This is all connected to the reams of daily identity judgments proffered by the media, not so concerned with actual deeds but positively obsessed by which category you belong to. They even dispense awards based not at all on merit or value, but on the end of achieving balance along a contrived spectrum. (As in, Women must be tech heads whether they like it or not.)
This is why they are comfortable condemning every White person as inescapably racist. It has nothing to do with his deeds, though they are ever ready to grasp at the slimmest hair to serve as “proof”! It is also how they (in neo-feminism) come to regard all males as unreformable rapists. It is what you are—and what you do won’t help. The guillotine never tires as it falls on all members of disfavored categories.

Now I’ve labored to contrast these worldviews because I want you to understand how, in a worst-case scenario, we ought still to vote for Judge Roy Moore. Moreover, not to vote for him would be to embrace and to live by the ethic of unbelief.

First, please make a note that I am not privy to any inside information. In fact, I already told you that one of the reasons we must ignore the gossip so dear to the Washington Press is that it is very unlikely, it is unrealistic to think any of us can come to know with certainty just what happened in the scenes being alleged. It was back in 1993 that I founded an outreach called Meantime Ministries, exclusively for women who had been sexually abused as children. I had to learn and unlearn a lot as I sought to bring the amazing grace of God to the lives of women who had been profoundly scarred as children. One thing I learned in spades is that “memory” is not a zero-sum entity.

The point is simply this: For people willing to believe the worst about these allegations, two very distinct groups should appear. The unbelievers who buy it, the Christ rejecters, have all they need to write Roy Moore off the planet. They are so manipulated by New York hypocrites that they’ll manage not to notice that between 2000 and 2010, CBS News reports, there were 3,853 minors married in New York State (and hundreds of thousands nationwide). You read that right. And not only are minimum age requirements absent in 27 of our states, but at one time New York minimum age for marriage was 14. Guess when that “Neanderthal policy” was abolished. Anyone? 1927 you say? 1968? Nope. The law changing the minimum age of marriage from 14 to 18 entered the NY books in June of this year. That’s right—in January of 2017, 14-year-olds, the youngest age of the Roy Moore’s alleged courtship “victims,” were eligible marriage partners in New York State.

Another factor: the 70s was the last generation in which girls envisioned marriage and family normally, i.e., not too long after physical maturation. With feminism’s devious and for-the-time-being triumph in relegating the home and family to the dust bin, girls have been bullied into birth control, harmful, temporary relationships, and into postponing marriage until after they’ve become good working men. If you’re going to judge, get all available factors in your judgment.

But returning to our two worldviews (which, remember, we are putting to a worst-case scenario in which Moore is absolutely guilty of all alleged), the unbelieving view says, “Forty years ago? Had something remotely to do with sex? Off with his head!”

But the Biblical Christian says, “Forty years ago? What’s he been doing since?” Because we have an ability that leftists don’t—to distinguish between (not sever) ontology and deeds, we are interested in knowing if even gross, undesirable, perhaps even once criminal behavior has continued to be a distinguishing feature in Roy Moore’s life? And what do we discover? We discover that, for the 32 years of his married life, even the Washington Post has conceded Judge Moore has lived a squeaky-clean life. Now, this leads an intelligent Christian to conclude (again, on the basis of a worst-case scenario) that one of two things (or both) happened. Either marriage did to Roy Moore what marriage has been known to do to men, i.e., fix them and turn them in to REAL men; or, Jesus Christ touched his heart and called Brother Moore back to Jesus and back to his senses. But in either case, we are NOT dealing with information confined to 40 years ago. We have info on an entire life!

Those with willfully truncated views—when they come upon a sinful juncture in a man’s life, erect a stop sign and declare (if politically expedient), “This man’s life stopped here, becoming at this point just irredeemable, useless crap. Go look for someone else.” But those with level heads, and especially those with Christian eyes say, “Hmm, well, if that happened, I don’t approve of it at all. But apparently, long ago, Judge Moore (assuming the worst-case view) came to the same conclusion and has lived an honorable life in accord with that self-judgment for more than 30 years.” Which ought to be the instinctual Christian view (in the imagined worst case)?

Believe me, I get the “Gotcha!” that you’re thinking of: “But that would mean he lied now in denying it.” First, that is still a maybe—we do not know this. But let’s call it a yes. And if it was a yes, I’d ask you, Dear Christian: is it beyond your ken to fathom why a man would want to keep such a difficult to fathom piece of his past from a “trial by newspaper,” especially something which, on any right view, is no longer truly the case? Is it a trial to grasp why a man would reflexively act to keep it from a venue where only one verdict would be permitted—and where the guillotine is on hand, in view, night and day?

I get why you might find this inadequate. We’re just trying to be thorough, playing out various possibilities. For me, for the reasons offered, all roads lead to a Moore vote, without hesitation or apology. Nevertheless, for the fortieth time, we should remind ourselves we are presently in a land of pure speculation. And that’s where this matter will remain, in fact, like it or not, until long after the election.

The Wall Street Journal, in an arrogant, hypocritical, dishonest and self-serving cynicism, tells Alabamans that a vote against Moore is righteous even though it is a vote for dead babies—now. Why is that, oh Grand Poohbah Journal? It is because you detest the positions, he took in controversial instances. And unless I’m very mistaken, I think it is especially against his Biblical view of homosexuality as sin that you carry the most resentment. It would be easier if you were honest, but you leave me only to follow the signs of your lies to their likeliest cause, rather than plain words (which require clear consciences).

Just one more item to consider before I test your patience with a short word on those twin controversies connected to Judge Roy Moore.

In September of 2010, an 18-year-old Rutgers freshman named Tyler Clementi—a homosexual who had confessed his self-understanding to his parents just prior to beginning his college career—committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. Before the suicide Tyler had been pranked by a straight roommate who, though yielding their room to Tyler for a liaison with a “date,” had first set up a computer to spy on Tyler & Friend. From another location the feed from the dorm room showed Tyler and a man kissing. Immediately upon Tyler’s suicide, the media went “homophobic” wild. The roommate spy was arrested, jailed, tried, jailed, partially vindicated, the occasion for a law being overturned, but in all, nearly ruined.

I am telling you about this incident because it contains two interesting, pertinent facts you should know. First: Tyler left a suicide note which was not made public or used in evidence because, it was claimed, what he wrote in it shed no light on those criminal proceedings. Say what? The note in which he explained his desperate action was irrelevant to that which put the roommate on trial? Isn’t there in this assertion an unavoidable inference that Tyler did NOT commit suicide because of the prank, or, to use Ellen’s all-encompassing phrase for disagreement—bullying. Reporters NEVER connected the dots for readers, though interestingly, some homosexual observers did. The known fact about his own outing to his parents shortly before his death, i.e., that it had gone very poorly, was covered up. The press, with the mother’s eventual help, would attribute her shock and disapproval when hearing her only son telling her he was gay, to the “evangelical church teachings” they had been subjected to. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the slap in the face of her grandmotherly hopes. Ha. Of course not.

That was one. The second pertinent item is this: Tyler was 18. He was just out of high school, only a month into college. He was, in fact, too young to legally purchase cigarettes in New Jersey, where he lived. But note this well: The “man” who visited Tyler in his State-supported school, was 32 years of age. Sound familiar? Funny how you heard not a PEEP from ANY quarter, yet that stretch exceeds even the “ten years” which one online genius claimed to be “the limit everybody knows.”

But please—get this: Not a whisper of disapproval, not a word of outrage condemning this unseemly cradle-snatcher (in which he got his planned sex, at least, sex as homosexuals define it). Not a single word judging this man who was nearly twice Tyler’s age, no word remotely akin to “predatory” was ever used in the major media. Yet compare the alleged “victims” of Mr. Moore: all healthy, no lasting effects, no nightmares, traumas, damage. Just long life. What well-adjusted victims! No wonder they could wait 40 years! —there was no hurry for there was no worry. But for the homosexual predator—who may well have contributed a material cause to a child’s suicide—for him the press had only words of honor and respect.

Worse. Much worse. Listen: The fully adult homosexual, the child-manipulator, in Tyler’s case, told the judge he didn’t want to personally appear in court. He said his reluctance to testify was because he was gay. He didn’t want to be seen or known. (That is understandable.) However, the law is the law and there is no provision for not appearing when summoned, and there is no allowance for anonymous testimony in a public trial. Such an accommodation had never been allowed in the history of New Jersey. No exceptions.

Guess what? Right. To the nauseating praise of the new religion, the pedophile’s sensitivity was permitted to upend the law code—and remnant of sanity—of an entire state. He not only got away with his sin, not only may he have gotten away with murder once removed (in culpability), but because he belongs to the anointed class of sexual perverts, But more than all this—he was accorded royal treatment when the entire State of New Jersey bowed to his sissy wishes and granted him what no one had ever been granted before: complete protection, anonymity and deference from the court–as if the perp was the judge!

No, the mainstream media is completely complicit in promoting, endorsing, protecting, deferring to children having sex—in every venue, at every turn—and nearly any kind of sex. BUT! But, when it serves their purposes to condemn it, well, they seamlessly don our convictions!

Now,

THE JUDGE ROY MOORE CONTROVERSIES
In the Time Magazine of October 30, 2017, a six-page spread on Judge Roy Moore makes it abundantly clear that he was targeted for rejection by the mainstream media before the Washington Post got to print one word of their slanderous gossip. The reporters were so astonished by Moore’s claims about America’s judicial system that they could only imagine that he made it up. They portray him as delusional. The article starts with these words: “Roy Moore has been talking with God.” Before the paragraph ends, they tell how “the twice-removed former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court leans back in his chair and shares what the Lord has told him (my underline—SMS).

Hmm. What was that? “Our rights come from God,” the 70-year-old Baptist says. “The Constitution was founded upon God. It was made for moral and religious people. It is the fallen nature of man that the Constitution meant to restrain.” You get the feeling it took all their self-control not to laugh in his face.

Thus, the press. I don’t know what they learned in college, but I sure know what they hadn’t learned. The idea that Moore might have told them a common piece of knowledge was unthinkable to them. He had to come by that by way of a word from the Almighty! What contemptuous, ignorant idiots.

It is, of course, a legitimate question to ask, whether there was, at our nation’s founding, a belief that our rights preceded our Constitution? Any well-taught school child could tell you—in fact, any person familiar with the topic (thus excluding Time reporters) can tell you the proof: The Declaration of Independence, penned more than a dozen years before the Constitution, explains that we were compelled to form our nation because a certain tyrant denied what we all know to be self-evidently true–the FACT that we are endowed by our Creator (note for Time Magazine: —that means God) with certain unalienable rights. The King of England said our rights come from him– and therefore they can be withdrawn by him. But America’s Founding Fathers said, “In a pig’s eye!” So not only is Judge Moore correct, but the truth he expressed is such a vital, elementary and important one for us that it is fair to say, we became a nation in order that it may be established forever and beyond doubt. How encouraging that our major media mavens never heard of it. Not!

Perhaps the lunatic reporters were misled by their reading of the Constitution, over which they superimposed notions of America’s commitment to keep God out of public policy, or that they favored a religious neutrality which works out to be: He who believes least has the most say? Such people have a devil of a time explaining things which our Fathers actually wrote, actually discussed, actually adopted and really codified. Things like these:

No man “who acknowledges the being of a God” can be deprived of his civil rights. That’s from a Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights (1776), but the sentiment is found saturating early state constitutions: The rights these documents guarded were the rights of Christian believers. We have been so heavily taught otherwise that the thought seems unthinkable. But there it is!

Delaware: “(A)ll persons professing the Christian religion ought forever to enjoy equal rights and privileges in this state” (Sect. 3, Delaware Declaration of Rights, September 11, 1776).

Maryland: “(A)s it is the duty of every man to worship God…all persons, professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection…” (Constitution of Maryland, Section XXXIII, November 3, 1776; incidentally, this is one of several constitutions restricting office to those who make “a declaration of belief in the Christian religion”).

Vermont: “(No) man who professes the protestant religion [may] be justly deprived or abridged of any civil right” (A Declaration of the Rights of the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont, July 1777).

Massachusetts: “(E)very denomination of Christians…shall be equally under the protection of the law…” (Constitution of Massachusetts, October 25, 1780). This document actually holds the very purpose of government to be the enablement of people to govern themselves. It is made explicit that the rights of the people under God are original, the government only insofar as it serves the people’s enjoyment of life, liberty and property.

I don’t need to tell you how snide, uppity, haughty and self-important the tone is. It never lets up. And they call that news reporting? Moore’s plainspoken views are true to fact. Yet, with no sign of even polite hesitation, they are mockingly treated like the rantings of a madman, a senile dreamer. The only dreamers are those who disagree with the truth the judge uttered. Did you read that tiny sampling from state constitutions, above? Our generation must mourn the condition of its press. Free? Yes—free to be ignorant, lazy and arrogant, all the while feeling safe and comfortable in their NYTwit blanket of lies.

In Judge Moore’s plain reading of the plain facts of history, modern disbelief finds an irresistible occasion to take their own fixed, insane hatred for God and pour their bile all over the judge. Most pitifully, however, their contempt for the Lord and truth have blinded them to the fact that Judge Moore’s “controversial” stances actually and genuinely represent their best interests. It has been the unique glory of the American experiment to seek in government precisely what Moore described: that government would, by the least intrusive means possible, restrain the nasty outworking of man’s fallen nature so as to allow the righteous to govern themselves. This land was to be a land for righteousness. Wickedness opposed it. But so did a long human history in which we found a strong human propensity toward tyranny. We sought in America to establish a system sufficiently equipped to inhibit wickedness while containing sufficient safeguards to inhibit tyranny.

The clearest and most direct path to tyranny will occurs in a system which imagines itself to be operating supremely, that is, a system which has deluded itself into believing it is under no Higher Authority. One of our most forceful ambitions at our founding was to perpetuate a republic which had been inoculated against the more obvious self-destructive systemic errors. Repeated again and again in official, adopted documents of the period are earnest pleas that remind every generation of Americans be taught and reminded of these first principles, for if they should ever fall from view, so would we: the entire experiment in righteous liberty would be brought to a bitter, violent and horrific end. The portentous, the frightful sound of the Time reporters’ mocking tone sounds too much like an angel’s trump of wrath to allow for much rest. Rather it sounds like a call for us to be cleansed of fatal erroneous presumptions. These ignorant sloths had never heard, had not even imagined that our Constitution—our nation—could be what it actually is, which happens to be precisely what Judge Roy Moore told them it was.

They respond: “I guess you must have gotten that gem by direct revelation from your Lord.” No, fool. Not direct. This is information available to any, to all. But when a godly jurist relayed to them fundamental fact of America—when he simply, humbly and plainly told them an American Truth, they thought he was off his rocker. He wasn’t.

This view of things—the very view espoused by Judge Roy Moore in the Time mockery piece, is an inescapable presupposition drawn from our original founding documents and confirmed by universal experience. Brilliantly distinguishing the American idea of rights from most or all others is the phrase, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…”

WAS THERE ANYTHING ELSE?
As to the other “controversy,” I can only say, we all should get on our knees every day to thank God that at least ONE MAN told the Supreme Court, “You have no right in heaven or on earth to define marriage contrary to the definition given by its Creator.”

Jesus also spoke of “What God has joined together.” God. Not the state. There is no gay marriage. It is a complete and utter fiction. It’s a tall-short, a loose-tight, an up-down.

The battle Roy Moore has the courage to enter is no varsity contest. He has precious few brothers-in-arms. The Wall Street Journal has other priorities. They’d have been wise to at least offer a word of encouragement for a man willing to engage in a conflict from which they stand to be beneficiaries. It is a fight for the soul of a nation. Wimps go home—or to Russia. The protests which followed Trump’s November ’16 victory should have been pale reflections of the holy rage loyal Americans should have brought to the streets following Windsor and Obergefell. Five Supremes imagined themselves possessed of power to tell God to go to Hell! And then they DEMANDED all Americans jump at their contemptuous command. Now, in the Jack Phillips case (the Christian cake-baker), they are preparing to tell us how high we must jump.

This—this!—in the one nation on earth which had been self-consciously founded to be a refuge from exactly these sorts of egregious, outrageous usurpations. The Supreme Court has no right whatsoever to overrule God! Our Fathers fought and bled to keep out of the hands of men any imagined or pretended “divine right” to veto God! Is every Christian so thick-skulled and stupid sop as not to see, gather, realize, grasp—that if man possesses the power to redefine marriage, he is thereby claiming the power and right to redefine everything. There has not been a more flagrant outrage in the history of our nation than that displayed in Windsor and Obergefell. And I know of only ONE public servant who had the guts to tell those fools they were naked, they were wrong, they stepped far outside their proper bounds. If you don’t think Judge Roy Moore was right in that, then don’t vote for him. But if you recognize in his LIFE and WORDS and CHARACTER the voice we so desperately need to speak truth at a time like this, I say in front of God, you have not been given a single reason that could justify your failure to vote for him.

I’m sorry I was unnecessarily harsh. But the issues, I pledge to you, are that serious. The people frolicking as if God is dead better hope they are right. I know they are wrong. What do you know?

May the One who freed us from great guilt and awful bondage—freed us to serve Him in fear and faith throughout our short lives—bless you in the knowledge of Him and in the power of His resurrection.

Yours and His,
Steve Schlissel