Posted on 09/04/2015 7:06:26 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
By the time you read this, Kim Davis will be sitting in a federal jail cell. Buzzfeed is already gloating over Davis’s perp photo.
Kim Davis’s crime? Refusing to affix her name to a same-sex marriage license, despite a direct court order to do so.
I have said before that religious-liberty protections cannot act as a bar to gay couples: If the law permits a U.S. citizen to get a license, there must be a way for the gay couple to access it, with their dignity intact.
But here’s the thing: “The law must be obeyed” is not the final word — morally, practically, or even legally. Sometimes the law is an ass and it must be changed. As Robin Fretwell Wilson said: “Mrs. Davis should not be permitted to lock Mr. Vincent and his fiancé out of marriage when the Supreme Court has spoken. But neither should she lose her job if the state can find creative solutions to avoid that unnecessary result.”
Kim Davis is showing us what conscience looks like. After all, getting in front of a slavishly approving media à la Ferguson does not confer moral significance on one’s willingness to break the civil law for a higher law. What makes civil disobedience noble is a willingness to sacrifice, if necessary, rather than submit to the civil law.
But is civil disobedience really necessary? The conscientious objector’s willingness to pay a price throws the ball back into our court: Are we satisfied with this result? Can we do better? Do we want to?
How we respond to the jailing of Kim Davis tells us a lot about where we are as a country and how the gay-marriage issue will unfold.
Right now, to their profound shame, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, and Lindsey Graham are siding with the judge who threw Kim Davis in jail for violating his order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Donald Trump is even more shamefully, dramatically silent.
#share#Meanwhile, over at the Boston Globe, the Voice of Massachusetts, Renee Graham sounded the key note for the inquisitors:
Davis is just the latest in a long, infernal line of fanatics to contort their so-called faith into an excuse for hatred and division. Religion has been misused to justify the Crusades, slavery, apartheid, the Holocaust and — more recently — terrorism and extremism around the world. If faith is a comfort to some, for people like Davis it’s a cudgel to scold and threaten anyone with whom they disagree.
I am sorry, Renee, but Kim Davis is not threatening anyone. The only person threatened with any punishment is Kim Davis.
Instead, Renee, it is your hatred and your desire to threaten, name-call, and scold gay-marriage dissenters into submitting that is on display at this hour. It is you and your friends and allies who refuse to support the obvious alternative that would protect the rights of same-sex couples while also protecting Kim Davis’s personal freedom.
According to CNN, when the news broke that Judge David Bunning had ordered Davis jailed, the crowd outside the courthouse incongruously burst out into a chant of “Love won! Love won!” I understand why the visceral response of gay-marriage supporters would be to cheer the jailing of Kim Davis. But in what Orwellian world does the desire to punish her represent a victory for love?
The jailing of Kim Davis is unnecessary. The governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, could have easily used the state Religious Freedom Restoration Act to authorize conscience exemptions for marriage clerks, essentially putting the burden of issuing the license on the office, not the individual. Five of six deputy marriage clerks have told the court they are willing to offer same-sex marriage licenses. Davis is unwilling to delegate authority to the clerks to sign the licenses with her name and seal, but that is a technical detail the governor or the legislature could easily overcome.
Free Kim Davis now. Our reaction to her jailing will tell us something important about the future of this country.
If she remains locked up at taxpayer expense, the only reason will be that Democrats want to use gay marriage as a club with which to beat traditional believers — and that Republicans are too gutless to act to stop them.
— Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project.
From tolerance to acceptance to forced indoctrination.
PRESS RELEASE
5-29-13
EEOC Sues Star Transport, Inc. for Religious Discrimination
Agency Charges Trucking Company Failed to Accommodate and Wrongfully Terminated Two Muslim Employees For Refusal to Deliver Alcohol Due to Religious Beliefs
PEORIA, Ill. - Star Transport, Inc., a trucking company based in Morton, Ill., violated federal law by failing to accommodate two employees because of their religion, Islam, and discharging them, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today.
The lawsuit alleged that Star Transport refused to provide two employees with an accommodation of their religious beliefs when it terminated their employment because they refused to deliver alcohol. According to EEOC District Director John P. Rowe, who supervised administrative investigation prior to filing the lawsuit, “Our investigation revealed that Star could have readily avoided assigning these employees to alcohol delivery without any undue hardship, but chose to force the issue despite the employees’ Islamic religion.”
Failure to accommodate the religious beliefs of employees, when this can be done without undue hardship, violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. The EEOC filed suit, (EEOC v. Star Transport, Inc., Civil Action No. 13 C 01240-JES-BGC, U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois in Peoria, assigned to U.S. District Judge James E. Shadid), after first attempting to reach a voluntary settlement through its statutory conciliation process. The agency seeks back pay and compensatory and punitive damages for the fired truck drivers and an order barring future discrimination and other relief.
John Hendrickson, the EEOC Regional Attorney for the Chicago District Office said, “Everyone has a right to observe his or her religious beliefs, and employers don’t get to pick and choose which religions and which religious practices they will accommodate. If an employer can reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious practice without an undue hardship, then it must do so. That is a principle which has been memorialized in federal employment law for almost50 years, and it is why EEOC is in this case.”
The EEOC’s Chicago District Office is responsible for processing charges of discrimination, administrative enforcement and the conduct of agency litigation in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and North and South Dakota, with Area Offices in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
The EEOC is responsible for enforcing federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination. Further information about the EEOC is available on its website at www.eeoc.gov.
RSS News Feed Twitter Facebook YouTube Channel
Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | USA.Gov
Just sayin'....
Gallagher is wrong.
“Davis is just the latest in a long, infernal line of fanatics to contort their so-called faith into an excuse for hatred and division.”
So that’s what they’re calling somebody who stands by her firmly-held religious beliefs these days. Yeah, she’s just like ISIS, y’know... /s
she was quoting a leftist
this was the author quoting a leftist
End all GOVERNMENT “marriage”. Marriage is a ceremony before God not GOVERNMENT. There is no battle to fight here except to get GOVERNMENT out of people’s personal lives.
Five unelected, unaccountable, partisan lawyers are not the final word on anything.
Perversion won! Perversion won!
Pray for Kim Davis. Pray for America.
From tolerance to acceptance to forced indoctrination to forced homosexual sex, oral and anal rape.
Major unaddressed problem in this issue:
Kentucky marriage law has not been clarified under the applicable SCOTUS ruling.
The law still is abundantly clear about who marriage licenses may be issued to, and judicial norm is that if a law is vacated due to an error in part the ENTIRE law is [considered] vacated. To wit: KY has no marriage law for Kim Davis to act on, and it is proper for her to (as has been doing) to not issue any such licenses to anyone.
So...she has lost her personal freedom because in her elected administrative capacity she is failing to act on a nonexistent law. That’s despotism.
859-392-7907
Call but please be respectful.
It seems like Maggie hasn’t read, or doesn’t understand, the first amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Queers have now been liberated from everything except their consciences.
I missed that. Thank you for the correction.
if mrs davis feels her conscience prevents her from following a court order, she should resign her office.
problem solved
Rosa Parks may have been the spark, but the movement was the thousands of people who caught fire from that spark.
Unless we see thousands of people in front of that courthouse protesting her jailing, there is no movement.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.