Republican senate candidate says ‘Maybe Putin is right’ on gays

 An Alabama judge who was removed from the bench twice had some nice words to say about Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Roy Moore was removed as Chief Justice of the Alabama  Supreme Court in 2003 when he refused to remove the Ten Commandments  from a government building even after a federal court ordered him to do  so. In 2016, he was suspended for ordering lower court judges to enforce the state’s ban on marriage between two people of the same-sex, despite the Obergefell v Hodges decision nullifying the ban.  Now Moore is running for a Senate seat left open by Jeff Sessions, who was appointed Attorney General. The Republican primary is next week, and Moore is showing well in polls. In an interview with the Guardian, Moore used a  famous quote from Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union – “the focus of  evil in the modern world” – to describe the United States. “You could say that about America, couldn’t you?” he said.  “We promote a lot of bad things.” The only example of “bad things” that  he provided was marriage equality.  When the interviewer said that Vladimir Putin had the same  opinions about LGBTQ rights, he replied, “Well, maybe Putin is right.  Maybe he’s more akin to me than I know.” Putin has won the admiration of the American right, in part because of his suppression of free speech for LGBTQ people.  Moore’s comments that America is “the focus of evil” follow  last year’s Republican presidential campaign whose theme was that the  United States is not great.