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Kim Davis and Faith in the Workplace
Kim Davis, the court clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples is going to jail for contempt of court. Her reasons for refusing to do so are because, in her own words, “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage, with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience.”
So quit your job, Kim. Problem solved.
I worked for ten years as a commercial/advertising photographer, and there were jobs I turned down on moral and religious grounds. I took a hit in the wallet for doing so, but I walked away with a clear conscience and good feeling knowing that there were just some things I would not do for money. Come to think of it, I’ve had moral qualms of one kind or another at just about every job I’ve had because I’m surrounded by people who don’t share my convictions. It’s not that I was asked to do anything illegal, but in every job, there are corners that can be cut and rules that can be bent. There were/are some lines I will not cross.
Yes, it’s more difficult to act like a Christian now than it was in, say, 1957 or thereabouts. However, how difficult was it for Paul, Barnabas, Aquila, Priscilla, et al., to live their lives in a culture and legal system that offered them no help whatsoever when it came to taking a stand for Christ? Despite that hostile environment, an environment in which thousands were killed for their beliefs, Christianity flourished and covered all of the Roman empire and the world. Maybe we need to take a long, hard look at the relationship between our faith, our culture, and our politics, and ask ourselves which of the three is truly most important in our lives.
Published in General
Let me remind people that our Constitution includes a ban on religious tests for public office.
If we get to the point where people of deeply-held religious beliefs are not allowed to work in any specific government office without abandoning their religious beliefs, we have violated the constitution.
The whole point here is that the grounds for her having to give out the licenses is dubious. We have all kinds of prudential accommodations for people to live in civil society without violating their well-formed consciences, as long as they are within reason (key qualifier). The Left is out for a scalp here, that’s why you hear silence from anyone on the Left who doesn’t want her to go to jail.
I think civil marriage and religious marriage haven’t been one and the same since civil courts took over from ecclesiastical courts a few hundred years ago (someone smarter than me can contribute the actual timing – paging James of England).
These are now separate institutions, though sometimes overlapping and sometimes concurrent. The fact remains that one can be civilly married without being religiously married. One can receive the religious sacrament without being civilly married. And certainly the consequences of each type are wholly different.
I’m not sure there’s a sense of marriage aside from civil or religious. I’m pretty sure there’s not but I think I’m a minority on “nature of marriage” issues on Ricochet.
She either should have resigned or she should have used her state’s law as defense. What if Rabbis start performing SSM’s, would she refuse those too and elevate her Christian view over the would-be Jewish one? I think her state’s law was her only legitimate leg to stand on.
President Obama has refused to do his job and faithfully execute the law. So please tell me the following:
1) how is this different?
2) Should Obama also be jailed? Eric Holder as well, right? How about Brown, in California, who refused to defend Prop 8?
3) Why aren’t we saying to them: “if you don’t like it, quit your job?”
I see no reason to put up with this sort of double standard.
Consider the dynamic at play here. For starters, note that an elected official has just been imprisoned for following an amendment to the Kentucky Constitution approved by 75 percent of voters in a 2004 referendum. But none of that matters. Anthony Kennedy has spoken, capping off a decade-long project to impose same sex marriage on 320 million Americans. He managed this by torturing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, a post-Civil War provision fashioned to guarantee fair and equitable treatment to freed slaves and their descendants, into something unrecognizable.
In his majority opinion, Anthony Kennedy writes:
So one lawyer joins another foursome who will reliably vote for anything carrying the Progressive label and that’s the end of it. It’s time once again to move on. We have learned the meaning of liberty, and the Newspeak version includes sending an observant Christian to prison for refusing to affirmatively further an institution unthinkable until fifteen or so years ago; one that noted homophobe Barack Obama opposed until practically the day before yesterday.
And now that the new tablets have been delivered from the mountain, Christians are expected to sit down, shut-up, and comply; reject their outdated heteronormative religion entirely; or retire from society and get out of the way. It’s the rule of law, man–or more accurately, justice.
Whatever your thoughts on the advisability of same sex marriage as policy, a system of government where five unelected judges invent a new amendment to the Constitution, trumping the first true amendment and the tenth, is the very definition of tyranny.
Certainly. If you are Christian who firmly believes that the death penalty is immoral (I know many), serving as a judge in a state that utilizes the death penalty is a job you should not apply for.
But if you’re a liberal pacifist hippie who doesn’t believe in the death penalty, you take that job and refuse to uphold the law. I don’t like our consistency on these questions.
What is the difference between a personal religious belief and a personal secular belief?
It’s not.
Yes, yes, and yes – or at least censured to the greatest degree possible (I don’t think jail was appropriate for Kim Davis either).
And that judge should also be removed/impeached from office.
And I see no double standard. We criticize Democrats every day on Ricochet for failing to uphold the Constitution or for not carrying out their duties while in public office.
I haven’t read the other responses but here’s mine.
I am not sympathetic with the argument that you should be able to refuse to do your job because you have certain religious beliefs or convictions of conscience. That would be absurd. But what is more absurd is that the consequences for not doing your job should include incarceration. That is profoundly disturbing. And it is a result of a fundamental misconception, namely, that courts can order other government actors and branches to do something. When a court overturns a law, it’s not ordering the executive branch of govt to do anything. It’s just saying, Do whatever you want, but if you bring a case like this again it won’t result ina conviction.
But this is different. This is ordering a state to take certain specific actions. It has no authority to enforce such a decree. Any more than it has the authority to order the state legislature to pass a a law changing the state definition of marriage, and to incarcerate any legislator who votes against it.
The clerk has no obligation to quit. If she continues in her position, it is because Kentucky allows her to. That’s on Kentucky.
Mendel is seeing the commissioner’s signature on the ball (as Dennis Miller used to say). I think you’ve got the nuances nailed.
It appears that there have been more than a few public officials who defied gay marriage laws but who suffered no consequences. Why the double standard?
Phil Lawler writes:
Lawler quotes R. R. Reno:
The entire article by Phil is great, and he ends with a flourish:
Following one’s rightly formed conscience can be worthy and good.
I would back her if the hunters could just move to the next table and get their paper signed. This case is more complicated. The form she is asked to sign says that the marriage is authorized by her–it is by her authority. That is specifically what she complains of. And the State need not crush her or deprive her of her livelihood so long as a reasonable accommodation is available. There are other clerks…
I think this was another targeted hit.
@Mendel, I’m not accusing US of having a double standard. Nobody on the left should be allowed to criticize, and this woman sure as [CoC] shouldn’t be put in jail, until the exact same punishment has been imposed on Obama, Holder, et. al…
What would it cost the state of Kentucky to provide this accommodation? Virtually nothing. It would, of course, set a precedent. But it would be easy to limit the precedent: if the state can reasonably meet its obligations while accommodating the official’s conscience it should do so.
Well, that’s not so easy for a middle class or lower middle class person to do. She took the job under certain circumstances and was in that job for years under those circumstances and now they changed under her. I like what Jeb Bush said. I’m sure the county could find an accommodation for her while the office fulfilling the obligations under the law.
I stoutly hate the phrase, “law of the land.” Those five judges created no law but rather expressed an unenforceable, unsupported opinion. The federal judge who threw her in the pokey said that he is above natural law, hence I conclude that he is above our Constitution which was firmly based on it.
Christians are now being driven from the public square and jailed, and I’m surprised there are actually people on this site who think that’s somehow defensible. She made bad decisions? She’s held that office since before the LGBT war on Christians. Are we to be Christians only for an hour on Sunday? Shame on those who don’t defend her for being a devout Christian, or rationalize her persecution.
Does anybody remember the founders’ primary sentiment for forming America? Avoid religious persecution. So now, in our so enlightened era, when a citizen doesn’t recognize a civil right to an aberrant behavior as defined by Christ Himself, that is her fault, and she must be shunned?
We stand together or we’ll be torn asunder by Satan and his acolytes.
Gotcha. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
One country clerk decides not to follow federal law and she is in jail.
Whole states have decided to not follow federal law and toke up a doobie and all is cool, man.
And speaking of our typical criticisms on Ricochet…
Leaving the SSM issue aside, doesn’t this woman seem to embody nearly every negative stereotype we have about government employees? Being hired by her own mother who got to set her salary sounds like a conservative parody of government employment.
While this is obviously separate from the actual issue under discussion, my original point stands: once you take a job with the government, you make a bargain with the devil.
(Granted, the quote is from Davis’ Wikipedia entry (which has probably been well-vetted by now). If someone has more accurate information, feel free to correct.)
According to the best research I’ve done, it was Martin Luther who first advocated for civil, rather than ecclesiastical marriage, because he didn’t want the church messing around with the worldly matter of who was marrying whom.
Whoops.
Pour encourager les autres.
As a Catholic I’m not falling over myself to validate Martin Luther, but I think this is not only a good idea I think it’s the reality of the situation. I think the different institutions serve different functions for different entities. We’ve been fortunate for so long that the two were basically complementary and concurrent, but there’s no reason they must remain so.
When Kim Davis took the job marriage in Kentucky was between a man and a woman. She is being made an example of by the left; comply or we’ll crush you.
Her incarceration is illegal, not because it violates her religious freedom (it doesn’t), but because it violates separation of powers. She can no more be incarcerated for her official actions or inactions, than the legislators making up the Kentucky legislature could be incarcerated if they refused to obey a court order to enact legislation to codify the Supreme Court decision.
The courts know not to try to hold a legislature in contempt, because it wouldn’t be tolerated. So they pick on the smaller target. But legally, there’s no difference. Legislators are elected officials, and so is this clerk.
Whether you fall on the side of the argument that she should resign or that she should fight, whether you think the state should accommodate her or not, whether you find her sympathetic or not, there is one central point: this is one front in a deliberate push to punish and marginalize Christians who hold convictions similar to those she expresses.
This particular aspect is complicated even to someone willing to yield not an inch on religious liberty; her own background (including the appointment by her own mother) makes her a less sympathetic figure.
Which goes to show that the battleground was well chosen. But it’s not the first. The question is not so much what should be done about this particular case, and more how this push should be responded to. And saying “the Republicans should do such-and-such, but they won’t” is a cop-out. Law, politics, culture, personal response — these are all different fronts. It’s too big of a fight to leave to a political party.
The hypocrisy between the outrage over this and the silence on the non-action by the left on gun laws in Washington DC, California and elsewhere is breathtaking.
That judge needs to be tarred and feathered.
Some people are never satisfied – though to give the Devil his due, they’re consistent.