Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Alabama, wrote two columns in 2006 criticizing the Bush administration for appointing openly gay men to government positions.
Moore, who in the past has said “homosexual conduct” should be illegal, won the Republican primary runoff this week. If he wins the Senate seat in December’s general election, Moore would routinely have a vote on executive branch appointees that require Senate confirmation.
The Moore campaign did not return a request for comment.
Writing in The Washington Times in 2006 about the reasons Republicans lost ground in that year’s midterm election, Moore called President George W. Bush’s nomination and the Senate’s confirmation of “admitted homosexual” Mark Dybul to be US Global AIDS coordinator an “open affront to Christian principles.”
“[Dybul’s] appointment was confirmed by a Republican Senate, which had previously rejected President Clinton’s nomination of an avowed homosexual as ambassador to Luxembourg,” wrote Moore, who at the time was serving as president of the Christian legal nonprofit he founded, the Foundation for Moral Law. “At Mr. Dybul’s swearing-in ceremony, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice introduced his parents and his male ‘partner,’ Jason. Miss Rice then referred to Jason’s mother as Mr. Dybul’s ‘mother-in-law,’ showing disdain for traditional marriage and an open acceptance of homosexuality.”
In another column that year, on the far-right website World Net Daily, Moore again expressed his opposition to Dybul’s appointment and noted Bush’s previous appointment of Michael Guest, who served as ambassador to Romania from 2001 to 2004. Moore lamented how Guest was “the first open homosexual to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in such a position.”
Moore’s non-profit, which is now run by his wife Kayla Moore, has continued to oppose the nomination of openly gay people to government positions. As recently as April, the foundation sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis opposing his nomination of an openly gay woman to be commandant of cadets at the US Air Force Academy.
“By nominating an open lesbian who proclaims that she is married to another woman, the Department of Defense states its disregard for the fundamental moral order established by God, thus breaking trust with the millions of Christians who voted for the new president in hope that the ungodly policies of the previous administration would be repudiated,” Kayla Moore wrote in the letter, according to excerpts that ran in World Net Daily.
