Wallace's daughter: Roy Moore is more dangerous than my father (al.com)
By Guest opinion
on January 07, 2016 at 2:55 PM, updated January 07, 2016 at 4:05 PM
By Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of Alabama Governors George and Lurleen Wallace
Floating the banner of "States Rights" to promote a policy of discrimination is nothing new to Alabama, but the latest shot over the bow by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore wherein he has ordered Alabama's Probate Judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples goes too far. Chief Justice Moore does not have the right to promote his personal agenda like the average politician does because in Moore's office in Montgomery, the law matters.
When my father, Governor George Wallace, stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama, it was a political gesture of appeasement to those that elected him to promote and defend the culture of racism and segregation that were as much a part of the South as its pine forests and cotton fields. My father did not travel to Tuscaloosa to debate with Nicholas Katzenbach on the merits of states rights. He was on a mission to fail and he knew it, but his politics required that he continue to insist on Standing Up for Alabama as he had promised the voters he would.
There was no excuse for the politics of exclusion that Governor Wallace promoted in the 1960s. He and other segregationists were on the wrong side of history and caused many Americans to suffer as a result. But my father was a politician first and foremost and as such had every right to ride on the wings of public opinion because his opinion mattered.
And now over a half-century later, Roy Moore has picked up the tattered flag of state's rights to voice his opinion on the issue of marriage equality.
Demagoguery is as much a part of the American political tradition as kissing babies. It is the engine that drives voters to kick the can down the road and into the voting booth. Politicians are encouraged, expected, and entitled to have their own opinions, freely expressed, to discredit their opponents, and rail against the government. That is, unless, they are members of the judiciary where their opinions should not count. And therein lies the distinction between Governor George Wallace and Chief Justice Roy Moore.
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more: http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/01/wallaces_daughter_roy_moore_is.html#incart_story_package
A few days ago, one entire page of our paper was devoted to criticism of Roy Moore. This was the third of three articles on that page.
