Kim Davis Is No Rosa Parks
Michael Gerson – The Washington Post
Rosa Parks is an American hero, but her case was not an accident…. Parks’s trip on Bus 2857 was not premeditated, but it was opportune. She was already an activist — known, respected and impressive. Elevating her case was one of the best and most strategic things that the civil rights movement ever did.
Kim Davis — the Kentucky clerk who was jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples — has been compared by some conservatives to Parks….
Rosa Parks arrives at circuit court to be arraigned in the racial bus boycott, Feb. 24, 1956 in Montgomery, Ala. (AP)
But there is no serious case to be made for the right of public officials to break laws they don’t agree with, even for religious reasons. This is, in essence, seizing power from our system of laws and courts…. The available alternatives are to implement the law (as public servants across red America have overwhelmingly done) or to resign in protest (as some have done as well).
As a conservative, I believe that facts and circumstances matter, and often complicate simple rules. A sheriff or magistrate in New Hampshire in the late 1850s would have been justified in choosing to look the other way rather than enforce the Fugitive Slave Act…. Whatever your view of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s ruling on marriage, granting a wedding license is not in the same category as participating in a legal system that supported chattel slavery.
What the Oath of Office Means to a Kentucky Clerk
Noah Feldman – Bloomberg View
What’s in an oath? That fascinating question arose as part of a crusade by Rowan County, Ky., Clerk Kim Davis to seek a religious exemption from issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. Before the U.S. Supreme Court put the kibosh on her claim, Davis in her legal brief argued that she understood her oath of office “to mean that, in upholding the federal and state constitutions and laws, she would not act in contradiction to the moral law of God.” Why? Because her oath included the words, “So help me God.” ….
It’s just fine — in fact, I think it’s admirable — for a public official to say that he or she won’t enforce any law that’s fundamentally immoral and in contradiction to God’s laws…. Given Davis’s statement of faith that it would violate her interpretation of God’s will to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, she should quit her position as county clerk. Indeed, she must — or she’d be living in a position of hypocritical sin.
But by saying she won’t issue the marriage licenses while serving in office, Davis is also, if I may humbly say so, committing a sin: violating an oath she made before God to uphold the Constitution and laws of the U.S.
Same-sex Lawlessness
Robert Knight – The Washington Times
If you have that sinking feeling that we’re living in a period of lawlessness, you’re not alone. Something is very out of whack in America.
Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, right, talks with David Moore following her office’s refusal to issue marriage licenses at the Rowan County Courthouse in Morehead, Ky., Sept. 1, 2015. (AP)
In Kentucky, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis was led off to jail on Thursday for disobeying a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to couples that lack a bride or a groom. Kentucky’s marriage law, part of the state Constitution that was put on the books by 75 percent of the voters in 2004, requires one of each sex.
Ms. Davis has been roundly denounced as lawless, but as a devout Christian, she regards the Supreme Court’s June opinion legalizing same-sex “marriage” as itself immoral, lawless and unsupported legally.
Ms. Davis is a canary in the coal mine, whose plight shows clearly how the legalization of same-sex marriage will lead directly to crises of conscience for Christians and others who thought they lived in a country whose Constitution explicitly protects religious liberty.
