Hugo Black — Supreme Court Justice of the U.S. and a former Representative and Senator from Alabama. Many historians place Black in a short list of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court.
It’s Black’s words relating to the Bill of Rights and in particular the First Amendment that could be used against Moore’s extremist views. Some examples,
“A union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.”
”The very reason for the First Amendment is to make the people of this country free to think, speak, write and worship as they wish, not as the Government commands.”
“The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power or the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support, or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say.”
“These men (the Founders) knew that the First Amendment, which tried to put an end to governmental control of religion and of prayer, was not written to destroy either. They knew rather that it was written to quiet well-justified fears which nearly all of them felt arising out of an awareness that governments of the past had shackled men's tongues to make them speak only the religious thoughts that government wanted them to speak and to pray only to the God that government wanted them to pray to. It is neither sacrilegious nor anti-religious to say that each separate government in this country should stay out of the business of writing or sanctioning official prayers and leave that purely religious function to the people themselves and to those the people choose to look to for religious guidance.”
He often is quoted on the importance of the free press,
“The Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
‘The firstness of the First Amendment,’ is how Black assigned importance to the liberties granted in the First. Recalling a long ago TV interview that I saw of him, Black said the rights in the First were at the top of the Bill of Rights because they were among the most important rights granted.
Black was viewed as a textualist on the Constitution. According to Wikipedia it is a theory in which the interpretation of the law is primarily based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text. So……..an inference could be made this is similar to Originalism. No brickbats please. I’m just using this as a political argument to say that Black held some views that are similar to what today’s conservatives love to see in ‘their’ Supreme Court Justices. Dare I say the name Scalia? This is all about framing a political argument — that’s all.
And yes he wrote the Korematsu decision and his vote on Griswold was one I would not have agreed with and he was a member of the Klan in his youth (resigning in 1925), but he’s still viewed as a great Justice.
So……...any Alabamians connected with the Doug Jones campaign, or any other interested citizens of Alabama it would be good to dust off the history books and see how the words and thinking of native son Hugo Black can be used against Moore.