Some women are voting for Roy Moore because assault is "part of life" in Alabama

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama — When Marjorie Reese, a 91-year-old retired secretary, was young, she didn’t think much of being sexually assaulted by men much older.

“Teachers touched us inappropriately, but we just didn’t say anything,” she said. “That was part of life, I guess.”

For many older women — in Alabama and elsewhere — the allegations that Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually assaulted girls as young as 14 when he was in his 30s are familiar.

Reese and her friend Margaret Tudor grew up around the same time, Reese in Tennessee and Tudor in Kentucky. They meet weekly at a senior center in Huntsville to make porcelain dolls, sewing costumes and painting blue-eyed, pink-cheeked faces onto blank forms.

The two friends agreed on one thing: When they were growing up, women were “the underdog,” Reese said. “We always had to do what the men said.”

But Reese is still supporting Moore. In fact — it’s her familiarity with the kind of allegations leveled against him that makes her doubt the women making them.

“Why would they want to get out in public and tell all of us? At this age, I’d go to my preacher and confess, or tell somebody in therapy, rather than the whole world,” she said.

Moore’s been accused of more than simply propositioning underage girls — one woman said that when he she was 14 and Moore was 31, he took her to his home, gave her alcohol, and undressed them both. Another woman has said Moore forced himself on her at the age of 16. In total, eight women have accused Moore of some type of sexual misconduct.

Moore has denied every charge, though the volume of accusations and his frequently shifting answers have caused an increasing number of Republican Party leaders to call for him to step out of the race.

Recent polls of the race have shown Democrat Dough Jones closing in on Moore — with one giving Jones the lead, something previously unthinkable in a deep-red state that hasn’t elected a Democrat statewide in more than a decade.

But a familiarity with the kind of charges made against Moore seems to be part of the reason he’s still maintaining support in his Senate campaign. Moore turned out hundreds of supporters at a public event this week where he dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and accused the media of reporting “fake news” against him.

At the senior center, many of a certain generation were quick to dismiss the allegations against him as well.

In the middle of a game in the center’s pool hall, Lee Strickland, an 82-year-old retired construction worker, said he didn’t believe Moore’s accusers — but the truth of their claims didn’t matter anyway.

“It’s an open question whether he did it, and if he did it still, maybe it wasn’t necessarily inappropriate. I would have to know more.”

Strickland said if it was true that Moore pursued a 14-year-old girl, it was simply “immature” of him.

“Just because he was with her, it’s not illegal.” At the time, the legal agent of consent in Alabama was 16.

Strickland’s comments echoed the sentiments expressed both privately and publicly among many in Alabama’s political and religious establishment, which is still widely supporting Moore.

Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler told the Washington Examiner last week that “there is nothing to see here.”

“The allegations are that a man in his early 30s dated teenage girls. Even the Washington Post report says that he never had sexual intercourse with any of the girls and never attempted sexual intercourse,” Ziegler said.

Many of the people at the senior center said they trust Moore, a Alabama chief justice, particularly because he’s known in the state as an unwavering religious conservative. Moore was removed from office twice for putting his religious beliefs before the law. He erected a statue of the 10 Commandments at his courthouse and refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage.

And religious conservatives have been some of his most outspoken supporters in the wake of the allegations against him. His recent public events have been hosted by pastors’ groups, and religious groups have rallied to defend him against even some of the most vivid allegations of underage sexual assault.

On Wednesday, Bryan Fischer, a prominent activist with the religious conservative American Family Association, dissected the accusations against Moore and found them, by his own evaluation, to be baseless.

“In Judge Moore’s case, there are five accusers according to the press. In truth, however, there are only two, since three of the five have not accused the judge of any kind of sexual impropriety. Kissing is not a crime,” he wrote.

He also counseled that Biblical teachings suggest Moore should still be given the benefit of the doubt, because in the alleged assaults “there is no second witness” who can corroborate each woman’s claim.

“There is no second witness in either case. This means, according to the teaching of Christ, we have no facts, no actual evidence to accuse Judge Roy Moore of anything,” he wrote.