Alabama Revisits Ten Commandments, Hoping for Help from Kavanaugh

McINTOSH, Ala. — At a Saturday night music festival about an hour north of Alabama’s gulf shore, the twangy refrain of a bluegrass song captured how seriously many religious conservatives are taking the battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh.

“Without a firm foundation, a house will fall apart,” the band sang, “but they can’t take the Ten Commandments out of the Bible or my heart.”

For many in the crowd of about 100, the commandments and Kavanaugh are paramount concerns this election season. More than a decade after Roy S. Moore was ousted as Alabama’s chief justice for defying federal court orders to remove a 5,280-pound stone slab of the commandments from the state judicial building, voters will consider a constitutional amendment in November that would allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed in schools and other public property across Alabama.

The amendment’s supporters hope it passes not just on principle but because of the almost-guaranteed response: a legal challenge that ends up in federal courts. Those campaigning for it now say their goal is to get a case before Supreme Court, where they hope — if a Justice Kavanaugh is on the bench — a conservative majority will rule in favor of such displays.

It is the kind of legal fight that social conservatives had been looking forward to having, in front of a Supreme Court realigned by President Donald Trump. After years of disappointing decisions on issues of fundamental importance to their movement like religious expression, abortion and gay rights, Kavanaugh’s nomination was supposed to be the moment when the religious right had good reason to hope for a more sympathetic high court.

“The liberals, the left, they’re scared to death because Trump is doing what he said he’d do, which is to make the Supreme Court go by the Constitution,” said Dean Young, a Christian activist and former chief strategist to Moore, who lost a race for Senate last year after several women claimed he had groped and harassed them as teenagers.

As Young spoke to the crowd on Saturday, with a 7-foot-high banner of the Ten Commandments propped up behind him, he said he would like nothing more than for the Alabama’s commandments amendment to be on the Supreme Court docket.

“They’ll make the decision that we are going to acknowledge God,” he said.

Though a Ten Commandments initiative has been proposed in years past and went nowhere, the issue was one that few Republican lawmakers wanted to oppose this year. The one Republican gubernatorial candidate who said he thought the amendment was unnecessary finished third out of fourth in the primary in June. (The candidate who came in fourth place was dead, having passed away unexpectedly a few months earlier.)

Alabama requires a three-fifths vote by the state legislature before a proposed amendment can go to the voters. It passed the state Senate 23-3 and the state House of Representatives 66-19, largely along party lines.

The overriding sentiment from the crowd in McIntosh, a mix of Baptists, Pentecostals and other Christian denominations,was that Kavanaugh should be confirmed quickly. Even the latest allegation from a Yale classmate of his who said he exposed himself to her at a party — which had not surfaced by the time of the festival — would probably hold little sway given how skeptically they viewed the first accuser.

The willingness of many of the president’s defenders to reject almost any accusations leveled against him or his administration as embittered exaggerations by people who can’t accept that he won has become commonplace each time a new controversy hits. But perhaps because of the high stakes of the Kavanaugh nomination and its importance to social conservatives — who among Trump’s supporters believe they have the most to win, or lose, from his presidency — the backlash has been especially potent this time.

At the festival, people expressed different reactions to Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that when they were in high school, a young Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed at a party and tried to remove her clothes. Some said it never happened, dismissing it as the fabrications of an agent paid to lie by Democrats. Others excused it as ordinary, hormonal teenage misbehavior.

But like many prominent Republicans and conservatives who have rallied to the judge’s side, everyone interviewed by The New York Times said Blasey’s accusation was another attempt by Democrats to interfere with Trump’s presidency and stop him from honoring the promises they elected him to fulfill.

“If they can’t win, pull out a scandal,” said Trish Bernard, 55, a retired school bus driver and milk carrier from Mt. Vernon, Alabama.

Bernard said she could still not get past what she suspected were the Democrats’ motives. The direction Trump has taken the country “may not be the way they wanted it,” she said. “And they haven’t been able to oust him.”

Bonnie Maddy, who retired a few years ago to Satsuma, Alabama, from Ohio, said that from everything she had read and heard about Kavanaugh, she believed he was “a good man,” and she said she thought he was being unfairly maligned.

“I believe that George Soros has a lot to do with it,” she said, referring to the billionaire funder of liberal causes. “I think a lot of money is being funneled into this.” Like many at the bluegrass festival, Riley Chestang, 58, of Creola, Alabama, was quick to invoke Moore. Standing beside a yellow sign tacked to a tree that said, “No profanity, no alcohol, no smoking, no pets,” Chestang said, “The same thing happened to Judge Roy Moore. I mean, you can put any kind of propaganda out.”

Kavanaugh, Chestang added, was put up by Trump — “the only president in my lifetime I’d take a bullet for,” he said — because he would “uphold the good that this nation needs.”

Moore has been mostly out of the public eye since he lost the Senate election last December. Reached by telephone in his office last week, he contended that there were parallels between his experience and Kavanaugh’s.

“I do think there’s a great similarity,” he said. “I highly regard women. So I don’t condone the mistreatment of women. But things that come up at the last minute, you’ve got to question when there’s such big consequences like a confirmation.” Senate Republicans, he argued, should move forward with the vote. “This delay, it’s just not right. They should go on and do what they do,” he said.

After days of legal wrangling, Blasey and Kavanaugh are both expected to testify on Thursday. But it could come at a cost for Republicans and the conservative movement, which has undertaken an aggressive campaign to defend Kavanaugh that has, at times, veered into unsettling territory.

Within minutes of Blasey’s story appearing in the Washington Post last week, theories and conspiracies about her motives began gaining traction online, sometimes given currency by influential conservative media personalities who spread them, including the Drudge Report, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

More broadly, the public relations machine defending the judge has big money behind it. In recent days, a conservative group that has spent tens of millions of dollars pushing for Trump’s judicial confirmations, the Judicial Crisis Network, has started running a television ad that calls the allegations “character assassination” and insists plainly: “This never happened.”

While some at the weekend festival in Alabama were inclined to believe that the accusation was fiction, others seemed focused on what they said was the Democrats’ real target: Trump.

“The harder they push against him, the more people like me who didn’t want him to start with are going with him,” said Bryan Bernard, 58, who is a barber and married to Trish, the retired bus driver.

Bryan Bernard said he initially supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 presidential election but eventually came around to seeing Trump as the fighter conservatives needed. He said he sees the Ten Commandments amendment in a similar vein — a fight that Alabama is taking to the left. And he wants to see the amendment approved and ultimately decided by the Supreme Court — with Kavanaugh on it.

“This is something we can do to punch them in the eye,” Bernard said.