Roy Moore Used Holocaust Poem To Protest Gay Marriage

Roy Moore Image by YouTube

By Nathan Guttman October 24, 2017

Image by Getty Images

Roy Moore, the Republican nominee in Alabama’s Senate race, has long been passionate about his opposition to same-sex marriage — so much so that he used one of the most famous poems from Nazi Germany to claim that those who share his views were being persecuted.

“We’re going through something in our country that other countries have gone through,” Moore said in a 2015 speech. “Germany went through it when the state took all power.” He then went on to quote Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…,” which addresses the silence of the German public in the face of the Holocaust.

Moore’s interpreted the poem to be about those who refused to fall in line with legislation preventing discrimination of same-sex couples. “They came for the bakers, but I didn’t bake cakes. They came for the florists, but I didn’t deal flowers. They came for a little clerk down in Kentucky by the name Kim Davis, but hey, I’m not a clerk. Then they came for me, and nobody was left.”

Moore was also criticized for a similar comparison in which he equated the demand to follow laws allowing gay marriage to following Nazi orders to kill Jews.

Moore was suspended from his role as the chief justice of Alabama’s state supreme court for continuing to uphold the state’s ban on same-sex marriage despite the United States Supreme Court ruling such bans unconstitutional.

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter, @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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