Roy Moore’s foundation hosted pro-Confederate secession events

The new Republican nominee for senator of Alabama has ties to Confederate secessionists that are as recent as the past decade, a new report says.

In 2009 and 2010, the foundation for Judge Roy Moore — who won a GOP runoff on Tuesday and is expected to win a general election this December — hosted an event by Confederate sympathizers to memorialize Alabama’s 1861 secession from the union.

CNN’s Chris Massie and Andrew Kaczynski broke the story on Wednesday:

The events, held at [Moore’s] Foundation for Moral Law’s building in 2009 and 2010, promoted a history of the Civil War sympathetic to the Confederate cause, in which the conflict is presented as one fought over the federal government violating the South’s sovereignty as opposed to one fought chiefly over the preservation of slavery.

Speakers at the events included Franklin Sanders, who is a board member of the League of the South, an organization that advocates for a “free and independent Southern republic,” and Rev. Chuck Baldwin, who has written that he believes “the South was right in the War Between the States” and that Confederate leaders were not racist. Most academic scholars identify slavery as a central cause of the war.

As Moore has risen on the national stage, his distinctive view of religion’s role in public life has gotten the most attention. He believes God’s law is superior to man’s, and that Muslims can’t serve in Congress because Islam is incompatible with the Constitution.

But he also holds a host of other policy positions that put him far afield from the Republican caucus. As the Week’s Ryan Cooper notes, Moore believes in an immediate repeal of Obamacare, which would throw 32 million people off their insurance, and his foundation shared a video in 2015 stating that President Obama was not an American citizen.

As for Senate Republicans, they’re mostly ducking questions about Moore’s policy views while also welcoming him into their caucus. “I don’t know anything about Roy Moore,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Politico’s John Bresnahan. “If I’ve read anything he’s said, I wouldn’t have any recollection of it.”