Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is warning Americans one more time that a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality would not only be against God and family but would "literally cause the destruction of our country."
The nine U.S. Supreme Court justices are preparing to issue a decision on marriage equality this month, and it's widely anticipated that they will rule in favor of equal marriage rights, as several lower courts have done.
"What [the court is] doing is they're toying with something that's like dynamite and will destroy our country," Justice Roy Moore told conservative website CNS News in an exclusive interview last week during the Family Research Council's annual pastors' retreat in Washington, D.C.
According to Moore, a ruling in favor of marriage equality would force Americans to accept same-sex marriage and support it through goods and services for those ceremonies.
"I think there's an attempt to destroy the institution of marriage and I think it will cause, literally cause the destruction of our country or lead to the destruction of our country over the long run," said Moore. "And I think there are people who would like to see this country destroyed."
Moore further told CNS News that not all gays and lesbians are hell-bent on causing the collapse of these United States: "I'm not saying that everyone who's homosexual wants to see the country destroyed. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a push for it."
It's certainly not Moore's first example of bizarre and hurtful comments aimed at LGBT people.
In a January conversation with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on his program Washington Watch, Moore lamented that the country no longer arrests and imprisons gays and lesbians.
A month later he claimed repeatedly -- and erroneously -- that federal courts have no power over state marriage laws and that Alabama probate judges, whose duties include issuing marriage licenses, don't have to follow a federal judge's pro-marriage equality decision because they were not named in the lawsuit in which she ruled.
"You have one federal judge who is reaching out and trying to bind the whole state. It is improper," Moore told the Associated Press in a recent interview.
"You're taking any definition of a family away," he said. "When two bisexuals or two transgendered marry, how large is that family? Can they marry two persons, one of the same sex and one of the opposite sex? Then, you've got a family of four or how many?"
And in March, Moore said the authority to define marriage comes only from God.
"No court has any authority to redefine what God proposed in Genesis," he said. "The definition of marriage, you want it by man, it doesn't come by man, it comes from God."
Last month Moore made headlines for scolding Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, saying she lacked "judicial ethics" because she performed a same-sex wedding. He called that an impeachable offense.
This was the latest controversial comment from the Alabama judge who rose to fame when he was
removed from office in 2003 for refusing to follow a federal court order to remove a monument bearing the Ten Commandments from a state courthouse in Alabama. Voters returned him to the chief justice's position in 2012.
