The genius of Moore is that he is unwilling to join in the usual proceduralist games that social conservatives in this country have been playing and losing for decades. It doesn’t matter to him in the slightest whether erecting a monument to the Decalogue on the grounds of the Alabama Supreme Court is a violation of the Establishment Clause or whether there is any constitutional warrant for proscribing sodomy, though as it happens he believes that in both cases he is legally in the clear. Roe v. Wade is not for him an unfortunate decision handed down by the Supreme Court without any identifiable basis in the plain words of the Constitution; it is wrong because the slaughter of infants is wrong. It does not occur to him to couch his support for these positions in legalistic terms. He holds them because he believes they are true.

This is the only way forward for social conservatives in this country. No progressive cares a fig whether Justice Anthony Kennedy’s psychedelic prose poem of a decision in Obergefell is “constitutional.” Obviously it isn’t. So why should opponents of same-sex marriage fight with one hand behind their backs? Straight shooting? Decorum? Being the bigger man? This isn’t a polo match.