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Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore’s top supporter is a hardline Confederate sympathizer with longtime ties to a secessionist group.

Michael David Peroutka (pictured on the right above, with Moore in 2011) has given Moore, his foundation and his campaigns well over a half-million dollars over the past decade-plus. He’s also expressed beliefs that make even Moore’s arguably theocratic anti-gay and anti-Muslim views look mainstream by comparison. Chief among them: He’s argued that the more Christian South needs to secede and form a new Biblical nation.

The close connections raise further questions about the racial and religious views of Moore, the former Alabama supreme court chief justice and the front-runner to become Alabama’s next U.S. senator.

...Peroutka, a 2004 Constitution Party presidential nominee who in 2014 won a seat as a Republican on the county commission in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, spent years on the board of the Alabama-based League of the South, a southern secessionist group which for years has called for a southern nation run by an “Anglo-Celtic” elite. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates the League of the South as a hate group (a designation Peroutka regularly jokes about). That organization, after Peroutka left, was one of the organizers of the Charlottesville protests last summer that ended in bloodshed.

Brian Beutler‏Verified account @brianbeutler 52m52 minutes ago
Brian Beutler Retweeted Josh Marshall
As long as nobody has taken a knee, I can’t fathom what the problem here is.

The Cancer in the Constitution
Timothy Egan, NYT, 10/06

One of the great disconnects of our history is how a nation birthed on the premise that all men are created equal could enshrine an entire race of people as three-fifths of a human being.

Not so with guns. The Second Amendment, as applied in the last 30 years or so, has become so perverted, twisted and misused that you have to see it now as the second original sin in the founding of this country, after slavery.

It wasn’t meant to be the instrument for the worst kind of American exceptionalism — setting up the United States as the most violent of developed nations. But it is now. The more we stand out for random mass killings daily, the more the leading cause becomes clear: the warped interpretation of the freedom to own lethal weaponry.

The amendment itself is not the problem. Yes, it’s vague, poorly worded, lacking nuance. But the intent is clear with the opening clause: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.”

The purpose is security — against foreign invaders and domestic insurrectionists.

All of his weapons were legal but should not be by any rational reading of the Second Amendment. Did the founders really intend to empower crazy people to kill children at school or worshipers in a church? If they did, then we should all have the right to portable nukes — for that is the logical conclusion of such an argument.

No, the Second Amendment became a cancer because lawmakers stopped making laws to match the technological advances of weaponry.

They did it to appease a lobby of gunmakers. And that cowering to a single special interest shows how the cancer has spread to the democracy itself, making it nearly impossible for majority will to be exercised.

The disgraced former cable pundit Bill O’Reilly said all the recent carnage is “the price of freedom.” But it’s not the price of freedom in Canada or Japan or England. It’s the price of freedom only in the United States, where mass killings have surged. In every other free country, sanity has prevailed.

And what about that “well regulated militia” part of the amendment? It’s overlooked in favor of the second clause, about the right of people to firearms.

President Roosevelt signed the National Firearms Act of 1934, restricting sales of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns — the weapons of choice for violent gangsters.

The Supreme Court, though it ruled 5-4 in the 2008 Heller case that an individual has the right to own a gun unconnected to service in a militia, has left the door open to sensible regulation.

“Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited,” the court wrote in that case. “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever for whatever purpose.”

But it was also a no-brainer to restrict people on terrorism watch lists from buying guns, as was proposed after the Orlando slaughter of 49 people last year.

It failed.

A healthy democracy, reflecting the outrage of its citizens and the common-sense will of the majority, would have done right by the Orlando victims in a heartbeat.

But we’re no longer a healthy democracy, thanks to the cancer that has grown out of the Constitution.

Quote:

Adam Schiff‏Verified account @RepAdamSchiff 21h21 hours ago
At urging of @NRA, Congress gave the gun industry an immunity from liability no other product enjoys. The bill I’m introducing repeals that:

This is a bill that deserves the support of everyone.

Quote:

If Democrats had any balls, they would follow Michael Moore's suggestion and move to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Well, lookie here, right in today's NYT:
Repeal the Second Amendment

hightor wrote:

Quote:

If Democrats had any balls, they would follow Michael Moore's suggestion and move to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Well, lookie here, right in today's NYT:
Repeal the Second Amendment

Good. Let's hope Dems heed the call.

The 2nd Amendment is the problem for those who wish to see far more restrictions on gun ownership than exist today. Laws can be passed in Blue States and cities, but eventually, they can also end up before the Supreme Court and be taken down for violating the 2nd Amendment.

If enough Americans feel as you do, the Constitution can be changed so why isn't anyone making a serious attempt to do so?

If enough Americans agree with them, it will happen.

We have a whole ton of issues that 'enough Americans agree' on, that still aren't happening and aren't likely to ever happen.