FAMILY VALUES?

The state of Alabama recently voted for former judge Roy Moore to be the Republican candidate for the Senate.  This was in spite of (or perhaps, because of) controversial stands and statements that Moore has made in the past.  He first came to national attention in 2003 when, as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, he refused to remove a ten commandments monument from the court house despite there being a federal order to do so.  He then went on to stake positions on the right that even most Republicans would find repulsive: from saying that homosexuals should be jailed to believing that Muslims should not be allowed to hold public office.  He was also a prominent birther, attacked evolution and defended the Confederacy. Sadly, none of these views hurt his standing in the party, and even worse, probably will help him in his Senate race.
It seemed like Moore was coasting to a victory until November 9th., when a Washington Post story broke claiming that when Moore was thirty two years old, he dated and had sex with a fourteen year old girl named Leigh Corfman.  The age of consent in Alabama at the time was sixteen, making this a crime.  Several other women have come forward to say that Moore dated them when they were under eighteen; he also allegedly bought them alcohol.  Moore has denied all the charges, claiming that they were "a desperate political attack by the National Democratic Party and The Washington Post".  This despite corroboration on the story from Corfman's mother, the assertion by one of his former colleagues that  "It was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls", and  the fact that Corfman herself is a Republican Trump voter, the notion that these charges are the result of a progressive media hit becomes less and less likely.  Some right wing media members have even tried to compare these allegations to the various Bill Clinton sexual scandals, as if a childish cry of "everybody else does it too!" somehow exonerates Moore's behavior.
The response to these allegations have been sadly predictable: while Senator John McCain and former Governor Mitt Romney  have stated that he should step down, and some other Republicans have withdrawn their support, party members in Alabama have mostly stood by him.  And, in what may be the single loopiest defense in political history, Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler compared Moore to Joseph in the bible, saying "take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”  Not only is he defending a modern law breaker with something that supposedly happened thousands of years ago, but he seems to have forgotten the meaning of the words Virgin  Mary!
And then there's the Trump administration; today White House officials have released a statement saying that Moore must be given a chance to defend himself before dropping out of the race.  This certainly is no surprise given that the president himself has been accused of sexual assault by no less than twelve women, all of whom he has dismissed as liars, despite the appearance of an Access Hollywood videotape in which he clearly can be heard bragging about making the exact same kind of assault on women that his accusers have claimed that he did.  An accused sexual assaulter defending an accused sexual predator is where this country has gotten to, and it's really no surprise.
The worst part of this is that there is still a very good chance that Moore will win his special election next month and join the Senate.  Unfortunately, the country is now so divided that even criminal allegations of pedophilia are not enough to stop Republicans in the state from voting for their side.  Really, why should they be expected to?  The same party that preaches family values and moral rectitude nominated a man for president who's been married three times and has had his sexual exploits paraded in tabloids for years.  All that really matters is winning.  Just ask one of Moore's defenders, Bibb County Republican chair Jerry Pow, who said he vote for Moore "even if the candidate committed a sex crime".   That, in a nut shell, is everything wrong with this deeply divided country today.