"...The tragedy is that there are simple ways to accommodate her convictions. Just remove her name from the marriage licenses.
That’s all she has asked from the beginning."
~ Democrat Kim Davis' Attorney, September 3rd
Well, the solution isn’t Office Depot… Really. But it is a printing issue. It’s a printing issue the Democratic Governor of Kentucky had a chance to resolve, via an eminently reasonable “public accommodation” put forth by Kim Davis herself, but he chose not to. We will detail that solution shortly, but I want drive home the point:
Democrat Kim Davis did what we tell our children to do when they’ve gotten themselves in a fix: solve your own problem. You got yourself there, and if you want my help extracting you from it, make it as easy as possible for me to “get to yes.” Offer up a proper solution. Not an excuse. A solution. So the irony here is that a Democratic Governor wouldn’t take “yes” for an answer from his fellow Democrat, thus it fell to a judge appointed by a Republican clean up their mess… though “clean up” here is analogous to selling the family car rather than taking the keys away from your 18 year old teenager because she drove it to a sky-clad full-moon ritual with a bunch of pagans rather than to midnight mass.
PFFT. ‘SUCKS TO BE YOU!’ SAYS THE DEMOCRAT ABOUT THE DEMOCRAT
From The Washington Post, September 1st: “The situation is putting pressure on political leaders in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear (D) has resisted calls to hold a special session of the state legislature to consider changes to state law that would allow accommodations for Davis and the two other defiant clerks. Among the accommodations that Davis has said would be acceptable is a proposal to remove county clerks’ names from marriage licenses.”
You see, Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis, is elected. That’s why the Governor has to be involved if there’s to be a remedy sufficient to keep her out of jail and/or make everyone happy. She can’t simply be fired. She is an elected Democrat who asked for help from her Democratic Governor who had it within his power to call the legislature back into session to do a very simple thing: tweak Kentucky law so that the county clerk’s name isn’t pre-printed on marriage certificates. That’s it. That’s all she asked. *She didn’t ask that they not be issued at all. She simply asked that her name not be pre-printed on them. Same-sex marriage certificates could then be issued, without incident, in every county clerk’s office in every corner of the state and betrothed couples could live happily ever after.
There’s been lots of very dishonest reporting yesterday on this very specific detail. It’s true that the judge let her out of jail in the late-afternoon hope that a compromise could be reached, and *it’s true Kim Davis said there were other clerks in her office who said they would be perfectly okay issuing same-sex marriage licenses, and Kim Davis said she could not consent to that, which on its face sounds really bad. But keep in mind: her name would still be printed on them, thus lending her implicit consent and facilitation to something that she regards as a sin, a sin that was not a part of the universe of her job duties when she sought the office prior to the Supreme Court decision.
The rules had changed after the game had begun and all Kim Davis was looking for was a reasonable public accommodation in the wake of it, and the Governor said, basically, ‘It’s too much trouble and too expensive to call the legislature back so throw her fat-ass in jail.’ Put aside for the moment that a Democrat is worried about spending money. Put aside for a moment that a Democrat chief executive is worried about pushing the legislative branch around. It is he who is being unreasonable here. This isn’t a matter of Kim Davis looking at an individual across the desk at the clerk’s office and saying, ‘You look gay to me; you can’t have a fishing license.’ That would be deeply wrong and I would want to throw her fat-ass in jail, too, if that’s what was going on, but it’s not. This is a profound shift in our culture, and every effort should be made to accommodate everyone’s sincerely held beliefs and get everyone what they want and are now entitled to.
IT’S THE QUALITY OF THE RIGHTS, NOT THE QUALITY OF THE HUMAN WHO CLAIMS THEM
So we have a woman in jail because she could not be compelled to do something she regarded as a sin, on her sincerely held religious beliefs. In America. A country founded on religious liberty. It’s our first liberty. Not the 3rd, or 8th. Our first. And it’s first for a reason. And it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s been divorced several times or works for the state. Your right to religious liberty doesn’t say you can have it unless you work for the state or unless you are without sin. That’s stupid. Profoundly stupid. That kind of argument then shifts the force of your rights away from the rights themselves to the quality of the human who claims them, on a sliding scale, and that’s a perversion, indeed, an inversion, of our system. The rights are the rights are the rights – unrelated to the quality of the human who claims them. Which is why I would feel this way if she were ex-con, or a pagan, or a Muslim, too. It doesn’t matter what her faith tradition is or how “fallen” she is or how ____. It. Doesn’t. Matter.
CAFETERIA-CONSTITUTIONALISM
You don’t stop having rights, you don’t sign away your rights if you work for the state, because if you do, then they are all imperiled. What about “involuntary servitude?” What if the state decides, ‘Yeah, your right not to be held in involuntary servitude doesn’t apply here. So no paycheck for you! And you can sleep on the floor in the closet and never see your family again.’ Absurd, right? No it’s not. NO. IT’S. NOT. If you want to go all cafeteria-constitution, then THAT’S the world you’ve made.
MENNONITES & GUNS AND OTHER STUPID ARGUMENTS
And just to clean up some of the other stupid arguments that go like, ‘Well, what if a Mennonite doesn’t want to issue a gun license?’ Did the Mennonite KNOW WHEN HE TOOK THE JOB that he would have to do that? Was the 2nd Amendment operational when he applied for the job? If the answer is ‘yes’ (which, of course, it is) then NO. He DOESN’T have the right to deny me my license, because HE KNEW WHEN HE TOOK THE JOB THAT WAS PART OF HIS JOB. That is NOT operational here with Kim Davis and ANY ARGUMENT that does not have as it’s premise CHANGING THE RULES MIDWAY THROUGH THE GAME is MOOT.
AND SPEAKING OF QUALITY, HOW ABOUT QUANTITY?
How many Kim Davises rotting in jail are we willing to tolerate? Right now Kim Davis comprises a population of one. What about 10? 100? 1000? 10,000?
At what point do we return to our senses and say, ‘THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE.’????
THE UNITED STATES OF SSM AMERICA
You can’t imprison Kim Davis and not imprison the baker, the photographer, the wedding-candle-stick maker. The inescapable, logical, inexorable extrapolation of the current situation is therefore, inarguably, this: Unless you are on-board with SSM (Same-Sex Marriage), ENTIRE SECTORS of the American economy, of American life, are now closed-off to you. You will now know, to a criminal certainty, that if you walk into your neighborhood bakery the proprietor has passed that litmus test.
Let that sink in, America.