Standing up to the Obergefellers

The clerk elected by the voters of Rowan County, Kentucky, has been sent to jail by a Kentucky federal judge for refusing to perform an act which she cannot legally do under existing Kentucky state law, because five majority justices of the United States Supreme Court have ordered that the people of Kentucky must now consider their people-made laws amended by that Court's ukase.

What is wrong with this picture? The clerk is enforcing Kentucky law as written by its people represented through its legislature, not as five unelected jurists in black robes say by fiat that Kentucky law must be.

The Supreme Court's majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges this past June is a crudely written joke. It is a spoof of the law, a caricature of the law, because it does not even pretend to connect itself with, or to respect the traditional boundaries of, the jurisprudence of our federal system. Federal courts have no business "defining" (or "redefining" -- the very word assumes a power they do not possess under the Constitution) State law in local family matters.

And now it has resulted in its first jailed Christian victim.

The moderates (who always want to die on some other hill more distant than this one) say that Kim Davis (for that is the Christian clerk's name) should not confuse her official duties with her religious ones, and that if her religious duties interfere too strongly with her official ones, she should resign. (They can't force her out of her elected office unless they get the Kentucky legislature -- that bastion of State law that the five Obergefellers dismissed as incompetent -- to impeach her. Good luck with that.)

But in this case, Ms. Davis' Christian duty is to uphold her oath of office, in which she swore to support and defend both the United States and Kentucky Constitutions. Although Chief Justice Marshall once famously wrote, "The Constitution is what this Court says it is," that claim cannot stand unqualified. The Supreme Court, for example, could not say that the Constitution requires States to grant no-fault divorces, and I don't believe any constitutional jurist would defend that proposition (at least, not today).

So where exactly does the Constitution say that the States must license same-sex unions? It doesn't say that -- anywhere. The five Obergefellers made it up out of whole cloth, by stretching the words of the Fourteenth Amendment beyond their breaking point. Because if the Fourteenth Amendment can be used to impose same-sex marriage on the States, then it can also be used to impose no-fault divorce on the States. (I suppose the argument would be that States without it are discriminating against adulterers -- who, the ACLU would say, have their rights, too.)

By refusing to carry out an unconstitutional federal order, Ms. Davis is upholding Kentucky law as written by its legislature, and as her oath of office requires. And she gets to be true to her religious duties as well -- a bonus for those who are Christian.

This is not, as the ACLU and other secular henchmen would portray it, "Christians imposing their morality on the rest of us." This is a case of a Christian holding fast to her religion by refusing to cave in to a secular religion that is at odds with State law as written by the State's legislature. It is the Obergefellers and the ACLU-types who want to impose their own particular brand of secular beliefs upon the rest of us.

I pray for many more stalwart Christians like Kim Davis. (Another Kentucky clerk -- who shares her last name but is no relation -- looks like he, too, will stick fast to his Christian duties in the face of a jail threat.) Send all the Christians to jail for setting such an example for the rest of us! As Doug Wilson says in his fine piece about this donnybrook (which I commend to your attention), "If just ten governors treated Obergefell the same way Kim Davis is treating it, that entire unrighteous and despotic imposition would collapse and fall to the ground."

Amen. May it be so.