Why Is Roy Moore’s Base OK With Assault Claims But Not Same-Sex Marriage?

Curtis M. Wong
Updated

Republican Senate hopeful Roy Moore may see himself as “the only one that can unite Democrats and Republicans,” but one political pundit begs to differ.

On Wednesday’s episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” The Daily Beast’s Sam Stein questioned the “moral thread” of Moore’s conservative base. Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, is facing allegations from at least five women who say he made advances on them when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s. One woman alleges that Moore undressed and touched her sexually, and another says he violently sexually assaulted her.

In spite of the accusations, Moore has ignored the suggestions of a number of fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), to drop out of the race. On Tuesday, the 70-year-old steered clear of the controversy when he defiantly spoke at the “God Save America Revival Conference” at Alabama’s Walker Springs Road Baptist Church.

The support for Moore on display at that event perplexed Stein, a former senior politics editor at HuffPost. “These people who are sitting in this event are comfortable enough with accusations of child molestation to support this guy,” Stein said, “but forcibly opposed to the concept of a gay couple getting married.”

He continued, “I just don’t understand where the moral thread is here.”

Moore, a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, doubled down on that stance during his Tuesday appearance, reportedly recalling the time he ordered state judges not to respect the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. (He was suspended from office in 2016 as a result.)

Last month, he blasted that Supreme Court decision as “even worse” than its ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott case, which found that no black people could claim U.S. citizenship.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.