David Michael Miller
I admire people who stick up for their principles and pay the price. That’s one reason so many of us revere people like Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. They violated laws that they believed were unjust, but they didn’t run and hide from the consequences. They went to jail for what they believed in. It also helped that what they believed in was the need to recognize everyone’s human dignity.
So for anyone to try to compare Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who was sent to jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, to heroes of civil disobedience is at best a stretch and at worst outrageous. But Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum did exactly that.
No, Sen. Santorum, Kim Davis is no Martin Luther King. What Kim Davis is is a weasel. Davis was elected to administer the law, not to make it. Why we elect these kinds of ministerial positions in the first place is beyond me, but it doesn’t matter. To those who say she shouldn’t have to surrender her strongly held personal beliefs to serve in public office, well, the clear answer is yes, actually, she does.
It doesn’t take a lot of hard thinking to understand why this is. We all carry around strongly held beliefs. Our society couldn’t function if government officials could substitute their personal positions for ones that have been arrived at through our democratic system.
Here in Dane County our own clerk, Scott McDonell, was on the other side of the gay marriage issue. He would have loved to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples long before any court said that he could. But he didn’t because he understood that his job was to faithfully carry out the laws of the land. This, no doubt, violated his strongly held personal beliefs, but he did his job.
That was a reality, and here’s a very plausible hypothetical. I know lots of religious environmentalists who view suburban sprawl as a violation of God’s creation. If one of them were elected to be a town clerk, would it be okay for them not to issue building permits in places they viewed as environmentally sensitive because they believe God wouldn’t want it?
You can quickly see where this kind of thing leads. Nonetheless, while I can’t say I respect Kim Davis’ position, I would respect her a lot more if she would do the right thing, which is, not to go to jail, but to resign her position on the grounds that she can’t square her conscience with what the law requires her to do.
Instead, Davis is taking the weasel’s way out. She’s holding on to her job and her government paycheck while refusing to issue any marriage licenses herself. Instead, she’s throwing her employees under the bus, allowing them to issue the licenses and to weather the wrath of her supporters. She gets to pose for holy pictures while her deputy clerks, who are just doing their jobs, take the heat. The New York Times reported a woman at the clerk’s office as saying, “That man right there [one of her deputies], while Kim was suffering in jail, was a coward, enough to be signing these homosexual marriage licenses.”
No, ma’am. The coward is the clerk. As Donald Trump might say (and I wish he would), Kim Davis — what a weasel.
