I will point this out....if this is all successful for the clerk in the end...why couldn’t you get a county clerk elected who was anti-hunter or anti-fishing, and they refused to hand out hunting licenses or fishing licenses? In some states, it’d done via a online process and avoids the country apparatus, but in some....it’s still at the county clerk’s office.
I agree, the law may be a travesty of justice, but until it’s overturned, gov’t workers have to follow the law. You can’t have a million county clerks making it up as they go. However, when someone doesn’t do their job, you let them go, not throw them in jail. Alas, Obama’s America.
There is a fundamental difference here that a lot of folks are missing: sodomite unions are fundamentally a violation of the natural law. Hunting is not a violation of the natural law nor is fishing.
The crux of this case is the following quote from the judge:
“The idea of natural law superceding [sic] this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed,” U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning told Rowan County clerk Kim Davis.
Sodomite unions are a violation of natural law. The judge acknowledges this yet says that the court's authority supercedes the natural law.
To put it in context, here are a couple of historical quotes that may be of interest:
“This natural law, being as old as mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, from this original.”
- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Introduction, Part the Second (1765)
So Blackstone believed that human laws in violation of the natural law were no laws at all.
Here's another, more lengthy, quote that captures the thought even better:
It is therefore an absurd extravagance in some philosophers to assert, that all things are necessarily just which are established by the civil laws and the institutions of nations. Are then the- laws of tyrants just, simply because they are laws ? Suppose the thirty tyrants of Athens had imposed certain laws on the Athenians ? or, suppose again that these Athenians were delighted with these tyrannical laws, would these laws on that account have been considered just ? For my own part, I do not think such laws deserve any greater estimation than that passed during our own interregnum, which ordained that the dictator should be empowered to put to death with impunity whatever citizens he pleased, without hearing them in their own defence.
For there is but one essential justice which cements society, and one law which establishes this justice. This law is right reason, which is the true rule of all commandments and prohibitions. Whoever neglects this law, whether written or unwritten, is necessarily unjust and wicked.
But if justice consists in submission to written laws and national customs, and if, as the same school affirms, every thing must be measured by utility alone, he who thinks that such conduct will be advantageous to him will neglect the laws, and break them if it is in his power. And the consequence is, that real justice has really no existence if it have not one by nature, and if that which is established as such on account of utility is overturned by some other utility.
But if nature does not ratify law, then all the virtues may lose their sway. For what becomes of generosity, patriotism, or friendship ] Where will the desire of benefitting our neighbours, or the gratitude that acknowledges kindness, be able to exist at all ? For all these virtues proceed from our natural inclination to love mankind. And this is the true basis of justice, and without this not only the mutual charities of men, but the religious services of the Gods, would be at an end ; for these are preserved, as I imagine, rather by the natural sympathy which subsists between divine and human beings, than by mere fear and timidity.
Marchus Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, Cap I (circa 50 AD)
The point being that who enforces human laws that are contrary to nature and right reason is the evil one.
You simply can't trivialize this by comparing formal cooperation with the evil State recognition of sodomy (a violation of natural law) with mundane matters like hunting, fishing, or even driver licenses. You can't equate it with matters of illegal aliens.
If the SCOTUS made a ruling ordering all physicians to perform abortions (in support of the invented "right" of a woman to kill her child), would you stand with the physician [possibly working in a public hospital] who said that he would not do so? Or would you say, "bake the cake." That's about the most timely analogy there is.
I heard her attorney this morning on FOX. This woman is not asking for a whole lot. Mainly kust to remove her name as issuer or certifier of the license.
Why is that such a big problem?
Monty Python skit coming into my head. Arrrgggg. I remember I think it was Cleese, going in to get a license for his pet fish. I need more coffee and I need to get ready for Mass.
Because one is a secular ideology and the other is a 1st Amendment Right.