Today, Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee will travel to Kentucky to support Kim Davis at an “#ImWithKim Liberty Rally”. His support of a woman who refused to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples (due to her belief in a homophobic deity) shows that once again, Huckabee and the Christian right have gotten it all wrong.
Due to their faith-derangement syndrome, Gov. Huckabee and the other supporters of Kim Davis are claiming that their religious rights are being persecuted (not being allowed to break the law and be a bigot apparently qualifies as “persecution” these days).
Kim Davis in federal custody removes all doubts about the criminalization of Christianity in this country. We must defend #ReligiousLiberty!
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 3, 2015
http://t.co/fYxFEng5gH #ImWithKim #KimDavis #ReligiousLiberty pic.twitter.com/MoTRHmmffo
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) September 3, 2015
While Kim Davis could easily have resigned her job, or delegated the task of signing the marriage licenses to a coworker who has the presence of mind to not believe in the talking snake, she instead chose to try to be a martyr for her cause. This way she gets people like Huckabee and Ted Cruz to rally behind her in support of her hateful beliefs.
Nobody is saying that Kim Davis can’t believe in a god, or even that she can’t speak to him in the privacy of her own home. However, she works for her state, and has to abide by laws. Refusing to obey the law because she is homophobic shouldn’t lead to rallies in her support. While Kim Davis claims to care about the “sanctity of marriage”, she is currently married to her fourth husband—that fact alone should disqualify her from taking the moral high ground and determining who gets to be married. This hypocrite doesn’t seem to mind that the Bible also denounces divorce and adultery.
Nobody is attacking Christianity, nor is anyone trying to criminalize it. The vast majority of Christians are not homophobic, and they are not being jailed for their beliefs. This is simply a case of a government official refusing to obey the law, due to the fact that religious indoctrination turned her into a person who is intolerant of those who are different. She can quit her job and be released immediately from jail. She can sign the marriage licenses and end this whole saga, and be released from jail. But she won’t, and the reason is that she has a seemingly unshakable faith in a bigoted god. Freedom of religion does not mean that people can hold a government office and then use that office in order to impose religious beliefs on others.
What would Rand Paul-claiming KY clerk exercised religious liberty-say if muslim court clerk refused marriage licenses to unchaperoned women
— Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) September 4, 2015
Huckabee is ignoring the fact that actual discrimination often is done by Christians themselves. In fact, seven U.S. states (including Huckabee’s home state) ban atheists from holding public office: Arkansas, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Our Founding Fathers would have been appalled by these laws—in fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote (about the supposed divinity of Jesus Christ) in an 1820 letter to a friend, “This belief carried therefore no more personal imputation, than the belief of Socrates, that himself was under the care and admonitions of a guardian daemon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects.” It’s interesting to note what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, penned in 1777 and enacted in 1786 (and still in the Virginia Constitution):
…that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion, and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency, is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment; and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own…and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
When Kim Davis’ supporters claim anti-Christian discrimination, they really mean that they’re upset that they don’t get special privileges to break the law in order to be intolerant of other people. Actor/comedian David Cross said it well:
I don’t understand why she thinks that strangers’ personal lives are any of her business. She believes that sinners will go to Hell, so why does she care what these “sinners” do—after all, aren’t they doomed to eternal damnation? Maybe she thinks that her god is absentminded (he might be distracted by hating so many groups of people) and will forget to torture people simply for following their nature, so it’s up to her to try to ruin their lives.
As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said,
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.