| Daniel Ritchie said, "Judge Moore was contending for the rights of God over a civil court which is supposed to be acting as God's servant. It is not the "just authority" of a civil court in the United States (or anywhere for that matter, but especially the USA) to forbid Christian religious expression; they had no just authority in this matter and Judge Moore rightfully resisted their undermining of the rights of the American people."
No. It is not the business of civil courts to conduct religious exercises, and 8 of the 9 Justices voted not to. Moore, when he was Chief Justice, went against the will of his 8 fellow justices and installed the monument, which he had no authority to do -- no authority under the laws of Alabama, and no justification under the Bible or Reformed standards. I have not heard anyone say he claims to be Reformed, so I don't know why we're invoking Reformed standards in judging his conduct. But we have been, in this thread.
This was a unilateral act on his part. He ran on that platform. He got elected on promising to do that, not on legal qualifications.
He is not a Christian leader. Any more than anyone deciding on his own, without any Biblical warrant, to do something strange in the guise of a religious exercise.
This is not a matter of some magistrate backing a Christian in a corner and ordering him not to do something that God directly commands him to do -- as in the instance of the disciples being commanded by the Sanhedrin not to speak of Jesus. Nowhere in Scripture are we commanded to place religious monuments on public property. Rather we are told to place them on our own property. That is where Roy Moore made his mistake. He was forcing his religious exercises on other people. That violates Liberty of Conscience and the laws of the land. He was lawfully ordered to remove the monument; he refused; and he was lawfully removed from office because of it. He was a lawless person, and he should not be revered by Christians because of it. I could understand some dispensational fundamentalist honoring the man, because they are into defeatist tokenism; but for Reformed people to do so is beyond me. We should know better. |