Roy Moore
GOP candidate for U.S. Senate Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., speaks during the U.S. Senate candidate forum held by the Shelby County Republican Party in Pelham, Ala., on Friday, Aug. 4, 2017. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

A video of an interview from 2005 of Republican US Senate candidate for Alabama, Roy Moore, surfaced Thursday in which the conservative Christian can be heard saying "homosexual conduct" should be illegal.

In an interview with liberal commentator Bill Press on C-SPAN2's After Words, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court also seemingly compared homosexual sex to bestiality.

The video emerged amid intense competition between Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) and Moore over who would win the Republican nomination to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat.

Moore had come on the show in 2005 to promote his book “So Help Me God,” and the anchor quotes some lines from it in the video: “homosexual conduct is and has been considered abhorrent, amoral, detestable, a crime against nature, a violation of the laws of nature and nature’s God upon which the nation and our laws are predicated."

Press then asks Moore if he still believed homosexual conduct should be illegal with reference to the 2003 landmark Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas that led to a state law banning sodomy being struck down and rendered similar laws across the country unconstitutional.

The following exchange then takes place:

Moore: What I think is that it was illegal under the law, that the Supreme Court usurped the role of the legislature and ruled something about our moral law that is improper, and that’s what we’re finding the Supreme Court and the federal district courts are doing daily. They’ve usurped the moral prerogative, now, if you want

Press: I don’t understand your answer. I think it’s a yes or no. Do you think that homosexual — homosexuality, or homosexual conduct should be illegal today? That’s a yes or no question.

Moore: Homosexual conduct should be illegal, yes.

Later in the interview, when Press asks why the government should ban what consenting adults did in the privacy of their own rooms, Moore compares gay sex with bestiality or sexual intercourse between a human and an animal.

Moore: Just because it’s done behind closed doors, it can still be prohibited by state law. Do you know that bestiality, the relationship between man and beast is prohibited in every state?

Press: Did I ask you about having sex with a cow?

Moore: No you didn’t.

Press: Or a horse, or a dog?

Moore: “It’s the same thing.”

Press: "No it's not. You mean homosexuality is same thing as bestiality?"

Moore: "It is a moral precept upon which this country was founded.”

Throughout his career, Moore has been a staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights and was even suspended for the rest of his term as Alabama’s chief justice last year for directing judges to enforce a ban on gay marriage despite the Supreme Court ruling legalizing it.

He could be heard saying similar things in another video posted on YouTube in 2015. In the video, Moore was asked, "Do you still think that homosexuality should be illegal?"

"I think homosexuality should be illegal," Moore said. "Sodomy was declared illegal by the United States Supreme Court in 1987, it said there was no right under the constitution to enlarge the fundamental rights of homosexuals."

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