Racists Holding Event at Former Justice Roy Moore’s Foundation
This coming Saturday, the Foundation for Moral Law (FML) in Montgomery, Ala., will be the site of the 2010 Alabama Secession Day Commemoration, featuring speakers tied to the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group that considers slavery “God-ordained” and advocates for “the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions.” The Foundation for Moral Law’s president is defrocked Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Judge Roy Moore, who is more commonly known as the “Ten Commandments judge.” In the dead of night on July 31, 2001, Moore placed a 2½-ton stone monument with the Decalogue carved on it in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court building, where he then presided. Moore was thrown out of office in 2003 by Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary after refusing to remove the monument, as he was ordered to do as the result of a federal lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The event is being organized by Patricia Godwin, a racist neo-Confederate from Selma who annually holds a birthday party to honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a wealthy slave trader who became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Godwin, who often refers in E-mails to her majority-black hometown as “Zimbabwe on de Alabamy,” has lately crusaded to block any acknowledgement on the Capitol grounds of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march. Godwin has railed at “the trash that came here in 1965,” complaining that those who honor the civil rights movement “are aiding and abetting the ultimate goal of the ONE WORLD ORDER — to BROWN AmeriKa and annihilate Anglo-Celtic-European culture!”
The event Godwin is advertising features quite a lineup of extremists. Franklin Sanders, a charter member of the League of the South, will be speaking. Sanders is a radical tax protester who writes on his website how state tax officials in Arkansas, where he was living at the time, found him liable for $30,000 in unpaid sales taxes, causing him to flee to Tennessee. In Tennessee, he ran afoul of both federal and state tax officials and eventually served time on state charges. He’s also a novelist. In 1989, Sanders published Heiland, a novel whose title means “savior” in German. In it, America is divided into two: the “Insiders” are the urban, pro-federal government population, while the “Freemen” are rural folks who refuse to pay taxes and live happily off the land. In the end, the Freemen realize they cannot live with the Insiders and decide to establish “the rule of Immanuel” by, in part, destroying Nashville with a laser freeze ray.
Another league favorite, John Eidsmoe, is on the bill. Eidsmoe is a former law school professor and close friend and one-time legal adviser to Roy Moore. A theocrat, Eidsmoe has suggested that the government “may not act contrary to God’s laws.” In 2005, Eidsmoe spoke to the national conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a hate group that routinely denigrates blacks as “genetically inferior,” complains about “Jewish power brokers,” calls homosexuals “perverted sodomites,” accuses immigrants of turning America into a “slimy brown mass of glop,” and named Lester Maddox, the now-deceased, ax handle-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, “Patriot of the Century.”
Chuck Baldwin, a Pensacola, Fla., pastor and former presidential candidate for the staunchly antigovernment, anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-immigrant Constitution Party, will also speak. Baldwin has written that “the South was right in the War Between the States” and that Martin Luther King Jr. “brought havoc and unrest to America as few men have ever done.” Baldwin also asserted during a campaign appearance that Sept. 11 could have been an inside job and vowed, if elected, to appoint an independent committee to uncover the truth. In recent months, Baldwin has been warning of President Obama’s supposed plans to return 200,000 troops from other countries to the U. S. Northern Command in preparation for an imminent civil war at home.
Godwin’s E-Mail says that the event is a “GRASSROOTS event & is NOT sponsored by the Foundation for Moral Law,” but she adds that “All Proceeds go to Foundation for Moral Law.”
UPDATE: Rich Hobson, executive director of the Foundation for Moral Law, told AP on Feb. 19 that Moore was unaware of the event.
