OPINION:
Many Christians think they’re changing places with homosexuals “in the closet” where the naughty are sent for a “time out.” A Kentucky county clerk has become the first conscientious objector to gay marriage to refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, and to go to jail for it. Tolerance is no longer the ideal: “Tolerance” has come to mean tolerating strange and even offensive alternate lifestyles, with no patience or deference to religious faith. Elsewhere, the First Amendment is under siege. “The law,” as Dickens’ Mr. Bumble observed, “is a idiot, a ass.”
Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, firmly refused a judge’s order last week to issue a license endorsed with her signature. “God’s moral law conflicts with my job duties,” Mrs. Davis told U.S. District Judge David Bunning. “You can’t be separated from something that’s in your heart and in your soul.” The judge sounded vaguely sympathetic but upheld the law as set down by the U.S. Supreme Court. “Her good faith belief is simply not a viable defense,” he said. “I myself have genuinely held religious beliefs, but I took an oath.”
Oaths to uphold the law must be honored, but sometimes it’s difficult to determine the difference between the law and a flaw in the law. Judge Bunning’s oath obligates him to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States and Mrs. Davis’ oath requires her to uphold the Constitution of the State of Kentucky, which (like natural law) defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Judge Bunning’s oath does not require him to put her in jail, and if everyone who defies immigration law, for one example, were put in jail there wouldn’t be space in the prisons for them. He could have made his point by imposing a small fine. We suspect it was a slight of the imagined grandeur of his office that offended him. She was released Tuesday after six days in a cell.
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by 5 to 4 that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, Chief Justice John G. Roberts warned in a dissenting opinion that liberty is threatened when judges attempt to bar core religious values from the public square. “The majority graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to ’advocate’ and ’teach’ their views of marriage,” he wrote. “The First Amendment guarantees, however, the freedom to ’exercise’ religion. Ominously, that is not a word the majority uses.”
Judge Bunning is but a cog in an impersonal legal machine set in motion by the Supreme Court’s rejection of states’ prerogative to define marriage as their citizens have chosen and the high court’s demand for obeisance to a prevailing “progressive” model. Mrs. Davis has thrown her belief in traditional marriage against the gears, following the brave tradition of the prisoner of conscience.
The clash of values over the meaning of marriage is not over. It has hardly begun. Mike Huckabee, a Republican presidential candidate and evangelical Christian observed in the wake of the jailing of Mrs. Davis that “Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country.” That might overstate it a bit, but his defiant declaration that “we must defend religious liberty” is right on point.
Congressional Republicans are already pushing back. The First Amendment Defense Act, introduced by Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, would prohibit government from interfering with the free exercise of religion and in particular protect from punishment persons with objections to same-sex marriage. The issue is larger than same-sex marriage. Religious liberty, one of the principles on which the nation was founded, is at stake. Nothing is more important to the survival of the republic.
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