Republican voters in Alabama are agonising over whether to do the right thing

If you encountered Roy Moore as a character in a novel, you’d roll your eyes and accuse the author of gross stereotyping. Look at him: a 70 year-old with a comb-over who dresses in cowboy outfits, a denier of evolution, a de-frocked judge, a lover of guns and Jesus—almost certainly in that order—a sworn enemy of feminism, gay rights, the United Nations, and “socialised medicine,” and now a man accused of dubious behavior with teenage girls. Even William Faulkner, creator of the outrageous “white trash” Snopes clan, never stuffed so many Southern clichés into one body.

Unfortunately for the South, indeed, the entire United States, Roy Moore is all too real, as large as life and twice as backward. And come 12^th December, he may be elected the United States senator from Alabama.

It will not, however, be an easy contest. Perhaps emboldened by those who’ve come forward to accuse Fox News presenters, Hollywood producers, actors, renowned comics, and other powerful men of sexual harassment and worse, four women have told the Washington Post that Roy Moore kissed them, and in one case, touched them inappropriately. One was an 18 year-old cheerleader, who says Moore plied her with Mateus Rosé; another, 17, says she met him when he gave a talk in her high school civics class; 14 year-old Wendy Miller says she was working as a Christmastime “Santa’s Helper” at the Gadsden, Alabama shopping mall when Moore first approached her, though he didn’t ask her on a date until she was 16.

Moore allegedly walked up to Leigh Corfman and her mother outside the Etowah County Courthouse, about to go into a child custody hearing, and offered to look after the girl so she could avoid seeing her parents wrangle over her. Later he started calling her. On one occasion, he drove her to his house 30 miles away, removed most of his clothes, removed most of hers, and, as she told the Post, “touched her through her bra and underpants,” then “guided her hand to his underwear.” He would have been 32 at the time. She was 14.

And now a fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson, has accused Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was 16.

Despite the popular assumption that Alabama is a wretched snake-handling, racist, Trump-loving backwater populated by trailer-dwellers convinced (like Roy Moore) that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born crypto-Muslim, Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ, and football is an act of worship, polls indicate that Moore’s support is eroding and that his opponent, Doug Jones, is gaining ground. Jones is best known for prosecuting some of the Ku Klux Klansmen responsible for killing four little girls in the 1963 bombing of an African American church in Birmingham, Alabama. Suburban women and Chamber of Commerce Republicans worried about attracting business to Alabama find Moore embarrassing and may cross over to vote Democratic in this most Republican of states.

Of course, Moore’s always been embarrassing. Even before Americans were assaulted with the mental image of him, as Leigh Corfman put it, wearing nothing but “tight white” underpants, he went around equating homosexuality with bestiality, refusing to accept science, and writing anti-abortion poetry with lines like:

America the Beautiful, or so you used to be, Land of the Pilgrims’ pride, I’m glad they’re not here to see, Babies piled in dumpsters, abortion on demand, Oh, sweet land of liberty, your house is on the sand.

Moore isn’t even a decent lawyer. While Chief Justice of the state supreme court in 2001, he installed a two-and-a-half tonne stone block carved with the Ten Commandments in the Judiciary Building–a clear violation of the separation of church and state. He was subsequently removed from the bench. When he won re-election to the court in 2013, he promptly defied the Constitution again by ordering state judges to ban same-sex marriages and was, once again, removed from the bench. He also found time to take more than a million dollars from a charitable institution he runs, the Foundation for Moral Law, but it seems that neither he nor his wife Kayla, a former second runner-up in the Miss Alabama US Teen Pageant and president of the foundation, found time to file their required tax forms.

Moore’s supporters say it’s all a plot by the ungodly to take down a righteous man. Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler didn’t see what the big deal was, after all, in the Bible Joseph was a grown man and Mary was a teenager, right? Alabama state representative Ed Henry says the whole thing’s made up for political purposes and the women should be prosecuted for, well, being accomplices to a crime (don’t try to work that one out), because if any of it were true, other people—credible people who don’t have one of those debilitating vaginas—would know about it!

Never mind that, in Alabama, various people have come forward to say that yes, Moore was thought to be into teenagers. And yes, they’ve thought so for a long time.

Many Alabamians are acutely aware of the darker side of their state’s history, and the way other Americans assume that everyone living in the state is a yahoo. They work long and hard to overcome Alabama’s unfortunate reputation. In 2004, the University of Alabama became the first American institution of higher learning to apologise for its role in sustaining slavery. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, founded by Alabama lawyers, fights against white supremacy and the myriad other forms of hatred which deform American life.

It may be that the white rightwing Fox News vote will turn out as strongly as they did for Donald Trump in 2016. Or maybe, a little creeped out by Roy Moore, they’ll stay home. If that happens, Alabama’s progressives could score a big win—morally and politically.