CLERK THE ONLY ONE OBEYING THE LAW

Transcription

1 CLERK THE ONLY ONE OBEYING THE LAW By: Bryan Fischer / Posted: Wednesday, September 2, :26 AM The distinctive mark of the American political experiment is that we are a nation of laws, not men. And what we mean by a law is something enacted by the elected representatives of the people or by the people themselves, whether at the state level or federal level. A corollary to the maxim that we are a nation of laws is that we are decidedly NOT a nation of rulings. A court ruling is not a law, it is a ruling. It may have the force of law due to the abject acquiescence of a meekly compliant people, but it is not a law. A law is not a law unless it is enacted according to constitutional procedure. Under our Constitution, courts have no power to make or change law, none whatsoever. A second mark of American jurisprudence is that no one is above the law. No one. This means the president of the United States is not above the law, as both Richard Nixon and the disbarred Bill Clinton discovered. But it also means that the Supreme Court of the United States is not above the law either. In Kentucky, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis is refusing to issue licenses to individuals wishing to enter into a sodomy-based marriage. She has every legal and constitutional right to do so, even though an activist judge is threatening to frog march her to jail in handcuffs for having the effrontery to follow both the law and her own conscience. The Constitution could not be any clearer. The very first words, after the Preamble, are these (emphasis mine throughout): All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives. If ALL legislative powers have been vested in Congress, how many legislative powers does that leave for the Supreme Court? None, zip, nada, zilch. The Supreme Court has not one ounce of legitimate authority to write law, to overturn law, or to amend law. None. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., an unjust ruling is no ruling at all. So the Court had precisely zero authority to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which was passed by overwhelming and bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, and signed into law by a Democrat president, Bill Clinton. DOMA makes it expressly clear that the business of defining marriage is an issue that belongs exclusively to the states. That is the LAW, passed by the elected representatives of the people in the constitutionally prescribed manner. If DOMA is to be amended or overturned, there is only one body on earth which has the legitimate power to do so, and that is Congress. The Supreme Court has absolutely no moral or constitutional authority to tamper with it at all. So if Congress by law has reserved to the states the right to define marriage, what has the state of Kentucky done about it? The people of Kentucky, according to the prescribed method outlined in

2 its state constitution, have defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman, period. Kentuckians enacted their marriage amendment in 2004 with an overwhelming 75% of the vote. Here s how the Kentucky constitution reads: Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Kentucky. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized. Thus, in Kentucky, according to the rule of law, marriage licenses can only permissibly be extended to couples consisting of one man and one woman. A marriage between two people of the same sex is not valid or recognized. Thus Kim Davis would actually be breaking the law and violating the constitution of the state of Kentucky by issuing same-sex licenses. Bottom line: Kim Davis is the only one in this sorry saga who is following the law and the Constitution. When she took her oath of office, it was an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of Kentucky. She did not take an oath to uphold the rulings of the Supreme Court, especially when submitting to such rulings would require her to violate her oath to uphold the Constitution. The federal judge who is threatening to throw her in jail is certainly not following the law. The braying hounds of the homosexual lobby who are threatening her life for obeying the law most certainly are not. Is Mrs. Davis guilty of fomenting anarchy? Hardly. The lawless ones in this sorry business are the five members of the Supreme Court who imposed their moral views about sexual deviancy on the entire nation. Anarchy already exists, because of an out-of-control judiciary. Kim Davis is challenging the lawlessness of the Court and seeking to return this land to the rule of law. She s not guilty in the least of civil disobedience. She is in fact practicing civil obedience in the highest sense, obedience to the Constitution and the law. If we are to get out from under the despotism of our judicial oligarchy, somebody has got to lead the way and strike the first blow against the chains of tyranny. Kim Davis may make an unlikely Joan of Arc, but Joan of Arc she may be. May her tribe of law-abiding, conscience-driven, public officials increase. Rapidly and soon.

3 We Don t Need Kim Davis to Be in Jail By Ryan T. Anderson, NYTimes, SEPT. 7, 2015 KIM DAVIS, the clerk in Rowan County, Ky., went to jail last week, and there was no good reason for her to be there. Americans can expect more conflicts over religious conscience and same-sex marriage if we don t find a way to coexist peacefully. Ms. Davis has become a symbol of what happens when we don t. Some on the left say that you must do every aspect of your job, despite your beliefs, or resign. But this has never been the practice in the United States. We have a rich history of accommodating conscientious objectors in a variety of settings, including government employees. Do we really want to say that an otherwise competent employee must quit or go to jail if there is another alternative? We shouldn t want that. Indeed, one state North Carolina has already shown how to accommodate conscience and ensure that all citizens receive the legal documents, including marriage licenses, for which they are eligible. The first thing to acknowledge, however, is that Ms. Davis didn t cause this problem. The Supreme Court did. When the court ruled in June that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, it redefined marriage for the nation, in a way that I and many others do not believe was constitutionally justified. And it redefined Ms. Davis s job. Had same-sex marriage come to Kentucky through the Legislature, lawmakers could have simultaneously created religious liberty protections and reasonable accommodations for civil servants. But the Supreme Court decided this issue itself and, as predicted by the dissenting justices, primed the nation for conflict. Because each marriage license issued by the clerk s office bore her name and title, Ms. Davis concluded that her religious beliefs meant she could not have her office issue licenses to samesex couples. So she had the office stop issuing them entirely. Ms. Davis felt she had to follow her conscience. And whether or not we share her Christian faith, and its particular positions about issuing civil marriage licenses, is beside the point. That, after all, is what religious freedom and religious accommodations are all about: creating the space for citizens to fulfill their duties, as they understand them, to God regardless of what the rest of us think. Of course, religious freedom and accommodations aren t absolute. Federal antidiscrimination law requires a reasonable accommodation of religious belief where it does not place undue hardships on the employer. And Kentucky, like many other states, provides additional protection against unnecessary government burdens on religion. So it was incumbent upon the government to try to work out a solution. Ms. Davis wasn t trying to prevent same-sex couples from getting marriage licenses at all; she just didn t want her name or title on the paperwork. That s why she wouldn t allow her deputies to issue the licenses.

4 Kentucky accommodates conscience for other licenses. Why not marriage? Yet Gov. Steven L. Beshear issued a mandate telling all county clerks to issue licenses to same-sex couples without exception. When asked to call a special session of the Legislature to try to work out a reasonable accommodation, he said it could wait until January. That s why Ms. Davis ended up in court. But it shouldn t have gotten to the point where this county clerk was being hailed as either a hero or a villain. The Kentucky Legislature should have looked instead to North Carolina. Sensing that the Supreme Court might redefine marriage, the North Carolina Legislature passed a law earlier in June creating a system to accommodate as far as possible the conscientious beliefs of magistrates who objected to performing same-sex marriages and clerks who objected to issuing licenses. The North Carolina law made clear that no eligible couple could be denied a marriage license, but officials could recuse themselves should they have sincere objections. By notifying a superior of their objection ahead of time, the clerks could protect their rights of conscience while ensuring that no couple would be inconvenienced. Perhaps a similar solution could be found in Kentucky, by removing an individual clerk s name and title from a marriage license. The state already amended licenses from Bride and Groom to Party 1 and Party 2. Why not make another change? The conflict over same-sex marriage is not settled, but it shouldn t be playing out in a Kentucky jail. And while the debate in Kentucky focused on a public official, others will continue to crop up involving private citizens bakers, florists, photographers whose beliefs may conflict with their ability to help celebrate same-sex weddings. In the aftermath of the court s marriage ruling, we need not perpetuate a culture war, and we need not seek a winner-take-all solution. Peaceful coexistence is possible. North Carolina gives us a good example on how to proceed.

5 All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists The New Yorker, September 8, 2015 By Lawrence M. Krauss As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a militant atheist. Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world? I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties, Paul said, on CNN. The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or to consider a less extreme case imagine an Islamicfundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist. The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do. In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even in the case of Hobby Lobby corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But religious freedom advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.

6 The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn t elevate them, either. In science, of course, the very word sacred is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. My practice as a scientist is atheistic, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. It s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word God mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature just as it s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law. Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst. This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives? Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have

7 heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially sacred truth, is an essential part of living in a free country. I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered sacred. Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend. If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.