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Alabama Senatorial candidate Roy Moore has led a controversial public career, to say the least. Its highlights include being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union when he was Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for erecting a monument bearing the Ten Commandments in the court building in 2001, and being dismissed from the bench by a state judiciary panel in 2003 for refusing to remove it. He was also an unapologetic birther, freely promoting and promulgating roundly disproven rumors that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States and was secretly a Muslim, and argued that homosexual conduct should be illegal. Although his views struck a chord with a subset of Alabama voters, propelling him to the Republican Party nomination in a run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at least one member of his own party, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), refused to endorse him on the grounds that Moore had expressed his personal belief that a practicing Muslim should not be a member of Congress because of his faith: In point of fact, imposing any sort of religious test as a qualification to hold office in the United States government is a violation of Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: Moore made the statement Flake was referring to in a December 2006 op-ed piece on the conservative web site WorldNetDaily concerning the election to the U.S. House of Representatives of Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota), a Muslim. The article was unambiguously titled Muslim Ellison Should Not Sit in Congress and compared allowing Ellison to go through with his expressed intention to be sworn in on the Quran instead of the Bible to allowing members of Congress to take their oaths on a copy of Mein Kampf: When asked by an MSNBC reporter in October 2017 if he stands by those views, Moore replied in the affirmative: In addition to criticism of his extreme views, Moore was hit in November 2017 with allegations (as yet unproven) that as a thirtysomething assistant district attorney in Etowah County, Alabama he initiated sexual encounters with underaged girls — including one who was allegedly just 14 years old.
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