Showing posts with label marriage licenses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marriage licenses. Show all posts

Sunday, September 13, 2015

A simple fact: "Gays, not Christians, are still America’s truly embattled minority."

Whomever chose Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" to serenade Kim Davis upon her release from prison merely offered the most recent example of American conservatives somehow not being able to grasp the applicability of popular music to photo ops.

Here are two hints: Read the lyrics and ask permission.

Conversely, had Davis chosen to expend her 14th minute of fame to bask in the glow of Ted Nugent's "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang," the planets would have remained in perfect ideological alignment.

But enough flippancy. As The Economist makes clear ...

Some martyr; Gays, not Christians, are still America’s truly embattled minority (The Economist)

 ... Ms Davis is fully entitled to her horror, but it is irrelevant to her duties ... to compare her recalcitrance, as some admirers have, to the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, or to the 19th-century figures who declined to return runaway slaves, is absurd.

Absurd because, unlike slavery or segregation, gay marriage is almost completely victimless. Therein lies another fallacy of Ms Davis’s martyrdom: she makes it seem that Christians have been persecuted by the Supreme Court’s ruling, directly and en masse, when, in reality, only a few have been inconvenienced (and many more gay Christians stand to benefit) ...

 ... The furore in Kentucky shows the extent to which some Christian Americans feel besieged by what they perceive as a strangulating godlessness. Given the freshness of the gay-marriage ruling, perhaps that paranoia is understandable. The truth, though, is that Americans’ freedom to practise their faiths is robustly defended by both the constitution and federal law (see article). The rights of the godly are actually much more secure than those of gay Americans—who still lack federal protection from prejudice like that granted to other groups by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In most states of America homophobes can still legally discriminate against homosexuals, married or otherwise. That is a much graver scandal than Ms Davis’s theatrical refusal to do her job.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Dunman on personal beliefs, public office, marriage licenses and why Dan Coffey should (but will not) read this.

It couldn't get any clearer.

Could it?

Opinion: County clerks cannot use the power of public office to impose personal beliefs on others, by Joe Dunman (Insider Louisville)

 ... But more troublesome than the logistical problems these bills create is the idea that state or county officials can even have religious objections at all. It’s important to understand that public officials like county clerks are government actors. While they’re at work, they’re not acting as private individuals. They’re acting as the government. When they stand behind that counter and issue licenses, or enforce the law in any way, they effectively cease to be individuals and instead become the government.

“The government” is people. It requires public officials to act in order for it to function. And those public officials swear an oath to uphold the constitutions of Kentucky and the United States (the latter trumps the former). In exchange for the power, prestige and compensation of public office, they agree to enforce the law and perform their duties regardless of their personal religious views. It’s critical that they do so, because neither Kentucky nor the United States is a theocracy.