Doug Moseley


Douglas Dewayne Moseley, known as Doug Moseley, was a United Methodist minister and author who later served as a Republican member of the Kentucky State Senate from 1974 to 1986. His Senate district included the eight counties of Adair, Clinton, Cumberland, Green, Metcalfe, Russell, Taylor and Wayne and at times Casey and a part of McCreary counties.

Early years and education

Moseley was born in Bowling Green, the seat of Warren County in western Kentucky, the son of J Lee Moseley and Eva Lottie Moore. J Lee Moseley was a teacher in the Boyce community, and the Moseleys originally lived in a tenant farm house on land originally owned by Doug Moseley's great-grandfather. Doug also has a sister, Barbara Moseley who married Bob Cockrum.
Moseley graduated in 1945 from Bowling Green High School. He is one of three members from that class inducted into the school's "Hall of Honor". He began his higher education at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green but transferred for his senior year to Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, from which he graduated in 1952.
In 1954, Moseley married the former Betty Jean Wyant, the daughter of a J.C. Penney manager originally from Indiana who was transferred to Glasgow, Kentucky.
He subsequently procured his Master of Divinity degree in 1957 from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1985, he was awarded an honorary doctorate for his public service from Union College in Barbourville in Knox County in southeastern Kentucky.

Methodist ministry

In 1942 at the age of fourteen, Moseley joined the Broadway United Methodist Church in Bowling Green, where he still holds his membership. He was licensed as a minister, with his first assignment as assistant pastor at the Broadway church. Thereafter, he was an assistant to the pastor for youth from 1948 to 1949 at the First United Methodist Church in Hopkinsville. From 1950 to 1955, he was the pastor of the Park City Methodist Church in Park City, an assignment which also included two smaller Barren County congregations, Highland and Old Zion. On his return from Emory University, Moseley was the pastor from 1958 to 1962 of the Russell Springs United Methodist Church in Russell Springs in Russell County. While still in Russell County, Moseley in 1960 began to teach religion courses at Methodist-affiliated Lindsey Wilson College in Columbia, the seat of Adair County. In 1962, Moseley became the chair of the Religion Department at Lindsey Wilson. He was later the assistant to the president for development and a tenured English professor for a decade.
After his Lindsey Wilson service and until his election to the state Senate, Moseley engaged in evangelistic work and was a drug and alcohol abuse counselor for the Lake Cumberland Area Development District. Throughout his state Senate service, Moseley continued to serve as pastor of various congregations. From 1974 to 1979, Moseley pastored the Trinity United Methodist Church in Columbia. From 1980 to 1983, he was a pastor in Albany in Clinton County. His last assignment from 1983 to 1990 was the pastorate of St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Campbellsville, the seat of Taylor County. Moseley recalls that no congregation created any obstacle to his simultaneous service as a state senator. Since his retirement in 1990, he has been a supply minister on various occasions.

Moseley in politics

In 1973, the Senate District 16 incumbent, attorney James A. Hicks of Clinton County, a Republican, did not seek reelection. Moseley won the Republican nomination for the seat in May by defeating his intraparty rivals in the primary, Thomas M. "Buck" Watson of Columbia and M.C. "Doc" Keen of Burkesville, the seat of Cumberland County. Watson had been a state representative from 1962 to 1966. Keen, who also served as Cumberland County sheriff and county judge, was a nephew by marriage of then U.S. Representative Tim Lee Carter and a son-in-law of Pearl Carter Pace, the first elected woman sheriff in Kentucky. Representative Carter did not become involved in the primary campaign. Years later, Moseley recalled the primary with kind remarks about his two rivals, whom he described as "personal friends". Moseley was then unopposed in the senatorial general election held on November 6, 1973.
In the 1976 presidential primary campaign, Moseley supported Ronald W. Reagan's unsuccessful challenge to sitting U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr. Moseley ran for a second term without opposition in 1977. In 1979, Moseley was state organization chairman of the gubernatorial campaign of former Governor Louie B. Nunn of Glasgow, the seat of Barren County, who lost in a comeback attempt to the Democrat John Y. Brown, Jr.. He had also supported Nunn in the hotly contested gubernatorial primary in 1967, when the Barren County judge narrowly defeated Marlow W. Cook, later a Republican U.S. senator from Kentucky. Moseley had first become acquainted with Nunn during the early 1950s, when he pastored the Park City congregation.
Moseley was elected to the Kentucky Senate for the third and last time in 1981 in what was subsequently expanded into a temporary five-year term. He handily defeated his intraparty rival, Russ Mobley, a theatre arts professor at Campbellsville University, then Campbellsville College. In 2000, Mobley won the first of four consecutive terms as a Republican member of the Kentucky House of Representatives from Taylor and Adair counties. The legislature moved elections in 1984 from odd years to coincide with congressional races in even years. Moseley said that the change was motivated by the desire to prevent elections for the legislature at the same time as county judges.
During his Senate tenure, Moseley worked alongside State Representative Herman Rattliff of Campbellsville. Moseley did not seek reelection to a fourth term in 1986, when he was succeeded by fellow Republican David L. Williams of Burkesville. At the time, Williams was an outgoing one-term member of the Kentucky House. Williams won the Republican nomination over Taylor County attorney Larry Noe of Campbellsville and then defeated Democratic opposition in the fall. In the 1991 gubernatorial primary, Moseley supported Larry Forgy, who lost the nomination to then U.S. Representative Larry Hopkins of Lexington. Hopkins was then defeated by the Democrat Brereton Jones.

Author and lecturer

In 2001, Moseley published the regional best seller, There Is More to Preaching, Than Just Preaching. According to Moseley, the work is an "oral history of religious, social, and political life in the mid-South" and reflects the comedic side of Moseley's half-century in the ministry. Moseley has also published a volume of poetry entitled A Table Speaks. He is working on a study of former U.S. Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush in a pending manuscript called From George W. to George W.
A frequent civic club speaker known for his humor, Moseley advises his audiences to research genealogy and to record for history the life stories of their ancestors.
In 2004, then Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher appointed Moseley to the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission. Prior to his time on the Ethics Commission, Moseley had served on the State Personnel Board, on the Kentucky Parole and Probation Board, and as district superintendent of the Kentucky Parks Department.
The Moseleys currently reside in Bowling Green and have three children: J Lewis Moseley, a business executive in Franklin, Tennessee; Rebekah Ellen Bragg, a retired teacher from Bowling Green, and Leslie Anne Watkins, also of Bowling Green.
Moseley died on 8 November 2017 at Hospice House in Southern Kentucky.