Politics & Power Quote by Roy Moore

Moore’s line is engineered to do two things at once: delegitimize the modern state and launder a sectarian claim into the language of American tradition. The punchy paradox at the center - government “taking” rights while “pretending” to “give” them - frames public authority as inherently deceptive. It’s not an argument about policy so much as an accusation about motive, the kind that turns bureaucratic disagreement into moral theft.

The key move is the substitution of sources. If rights come from God, then courts, legislatures, and elections become secondary at best and illegitimate at worst when they conflict with the speaker’s reading of divine law. That shift doesn’t just elevate “religious freedom”; it provides a veto. Any expansion of rights Moore dislikes can be cast as counterfeit, because the state is merely “pretending” - a word that implies bad faith, theater, fraud.

“Recognized throughout our history” is the soft-focus appeal to consensus, a claim that avoids naming whose history and whose God. It compresses a messy constitutional reality - rights emerging through amendments, litigation, and social struggle - into a simpler origin story that feels stable and pre-political. Subtextually, it’s also a culture-war tell: this framing has been most useful in fights over church-state separation, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and the authority of federal courts.

Coming from a judge, the message is especially charged. It signals that legal legitimacy should be measured not only by constitutional reasoning but by alignment with a higher, religiously defined order. That’s less jurisprudence than insurgent theology in a robe.