Politics & Power Quote by Roy Moore

Rights framed as a divine endowment are meant to sound like the strongest possible legal foundation: older than constitutions, sturdier than courts, immune to majority vote. Roy Moore, a judge who made his career out of performative clashes between biblical authority and secular government, uses that premise as both shield and sword. Shield, because it turns political grievances into sacred ones; if a policy feels like an affront, it can be recast as blasphemy against God-given liberty. Sword, because it quietly delegitimizes any state action Moore dislikes as not just wrong, but illegitimate by definition.

The rhetorical trick is the word “gives.” It bypasses the messy, negotiated reality of rights in a pluralist democracy - rights as promises we bind ourselves to through law, argument, and enforcement - and replaces it with a heavenly title deed. That move flatters the listener with certainty. It also narrows the circle of belonging: if rights come from God, whose God is doing the granting, and who gets to interpret the terms? Moore’s worldview has been explicit about that interpretive authority.

Context matters because the line echoes the Founders’ “endowed by their Creator” language, but Moore’s legal fights - from Ten Commandments monuments to resistance against same-sex marriage rulings - show the subtext: not all rights claims are equal. The phrase “no government can take them away” reads like anti-tyranny populism, yet it also implies that courts and democratic institutions are secondary to a higher law Moore positions himself to mediate. It’s a moral absolute that works by skipping the one thing rights always require: collective, enforceable agreement among people who don’t share the same theology.