For Pryor, Religious, Legal, Rights in Conflict (Ten Commandments)

Senators, Bible Belt Blast Alabama Attorney General

MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 24 -- Bill Pryor once seemed to be the charmed wunderkind of Alabama politics.

Clean-cut and articulate, he was celebrated as the youngest attorney general in the nation when he was appointed to the post in January 1997 at age 34. Since then, the conservative Republican has been elected twice, the second with 59 percent of the vote last year.

But Pryor now finds himself walking a precarious political tightrope.

He is trying to keep alive his nomination for a federal appeals court judgeship, which has been blocked by Senate Democrats who accuse him -- among other things -- of blurring the lines between church and state. At the same time, he is being accused of betraying Christian fundamentalists by backing the removal of a two-ton Ten Commandments monument from Alabama's Supreme Court after two years of applauding the controversial display placed there by Chief Justice Roy S. Moore.

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Until last week, Pryor, 41, was considered a darling of fundamentalist Christians, whose political might is unquestioned in this heavily conservative Bible Belt state. He wrote newspaper opinion pieces defending what he said was Moore's right to place hand-carved Ten Commandments tablets in a state courthouse north of Birmingham. Later, he spoke at a rally of supporters of the Supreme Court monument, which Moore installed late one night in the summer of 2001 with the help of the Florida-based Coral Ridge Ministries evangelical group.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39938-2003Aug24.html

Not too bright is he? One day he claims he's for the monument, the next he says it has to go. Don't know about his lawyering, but as a politico, he's shot. Good-bye, Pryor. Glad to see you go. Guess you forgot all about the false witness command, eh?