Roy Moore is a former Alabama state court judge who earned a certain type of notoriety for refusing to remove a wooden plaque of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom that he had installed after taking the bench in 1992. In 2000, Moore was elected as Alabama's chief justice after running a campaign that argued, among other things, that the absence of organized religion in the American justice system "corresponded directly with school violence, homosexuality, and crime." Once there, he promptly commissioned a granite version of his Ten Commandments plaque and had it displayed in the Alabama Supreme Court building. Moore lost several subsequent lawsuits, led by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, that sought its removal, and when Moore refused to comply with a federal court order to take the monument out of his courtroom, he was relieved of his position in a disciplinary proceeding before the Alabama Court of the Judiciary.