They
were having a conniption fit on MSNBC over the jailing of Kim Davis, Rowan
County, KY County Clerk who refused to sign marriage certificates for
homosexuals. So why don’t any of the
pundits say the obvious? We have a
Supreme Court which says that the 14th amendment of the Constitution
authorizes gay marriage. And a Christian who, following Orthodox Christian teaching
and her own walk with the Holy Spirit refuses to sign ‘em. To jail someone and demand they violate their
own faith is a violation of the free exercise clause of the 1st
Amendment. Conflicting laws. Ergo: the state has to change its way of
doing gay marriages. Stop requiring someone who might be a Christian to violate
their walk with God. Require state seal, witnessed signatures or some other
hocus-pocus instead of a signature by the clerk.
The learned panel on MSNBC (ahem!)
said that she should be punished even worse, given fines she will never be able
to repay and thus force her hand to sign her name. Well, one calmer person said she should just
resign. They were aghast that, as an
elected official, she had to be impeached and likely the KY legislature
wouldn’t impeach her. They probably
agree with her. Everybody, and I mean everybody was cock sure that no one on
the right would support religious liberty if it was Hindu or Islam. One pundit got his underwear in a wad because
she was claiming free speech had been violated.
May I point out that it is not the
free speech clause of A1 that is violated.
It is the free exercise of religion clause. Another way to say it is that “Liberty” was
violated. Liberty was the word coined by
John Locke to mean the ability of one to follow the inner voice, the Holy
Spirit, the religious conscience (equated with the work of the Holy Spirit by
Apostle Paul and the writer of Hebrews).
Liberty is the thing that is guaranteed in the Declaration-- “Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
To violate someone’s liberty is to risk violating God’s relationship
with one of His children. People will fight to death over loss of Liberty. “Give me liberty or give me death” was no
idle threat. Thus we don’t require Conscientious Objectors or Mennonites to
fight in War or demand Muslims serve alcohol or insist that Hindus eat beef.
Well, I say that people might fight for
liberty but I don’t really know, maybe modern people would just wuss out. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer told some pastors who
came to visit him in a Nazi prison, “Why aren’t you here, too?” I doubt that neither the MSNBC pundits or many
moderns read Leviticus 18 or Jesus’s words of Matthew 19, let alone believe
them to be the inspired word of God.
My prayers are with Kim. I pray for her strength. Why, oh why, do new Christians often face a
test like this, I don’t understand. God
only knows. It happened to the
Phillippians and Ephesians, the first Japanese Christians, the Yangtze River
kids who hardly knew a scripture passage when the communist goons lined them up
in ditches and massacred them.
All I know is that this isn’t the
America. I once knew America. Must be
some other tyrannical place.
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