Kim Davis Is a Gift to Gay Rights [View all]

[Agschmid]

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On Friday morning, same-sex couples in Rowan County, Kentucky, finally got the marriage licenses that the Supreme Court ruled must be provided to them. Kim Davis, the county clerk who refused to issue licenses because of her anti-gay beliefs, is in jail, where she will remain until she agrees to issue licenses or resigns. Her defiance delayed marriages in her county by roughly two months. Those months were difficult from the couples who were humiliated and stigmatized by her discrimination. But they were an immense victory for the broader cause of gay rights—in particular, the battle between nondiscrimination and “religious liberty.”

Ever since nationwide marriage equality began to seem inevitable, cultural conservatives have sought to use hazy claims of “religious liberty” to fight back against LGBT rights. Bakers in Colorado and Oregon who denied service to same-sex couples—and faced fines for their discrimination—may not have had any real legal argument. But they were appealing figures whose cases pointed toward a concrete goal of conservatives: granting businesses a special right to turn away gay couples.

Kim Davis also presents no real legal argument: She claims she’s acting “under God’s authority,” while her extremist attorneys have filed rambling, impudent briefs that attack the Supreme Court’s decision instead of working around it. But unlike the cake warriors, Davis isn’t advancing any concrete conservative goal. Anti-gay activists certainly want to protect anti-gay clerks from having to issue licenses to gay couples. But the right generally favors a fix like North Carolina’s recently enacted law, which lets religious clerks exempt themselves from granting licenses—but ensures that at least one clerk will always be willing to serve. (Davis, in contrast, barred her staff from processing licenses because her name would appear on them.)

Davis wasn’t patient enough to await a legislative solution—or gracious enough to simply resign from the job that she was clearly no longer capable of doing. Instead, she brazenly broke the law and defied a court order that the Supreme Court of the United States itself declined to stay. This flagrant law-breaking alienated Davis’ would-be allies in the press, from the American Conservative’s dyspeptically brilliant Rod Dreher, to the National Review’s gloriously unhinged Charles C.W. Cooke and Kevin D. Williamson. These men have spent years cheering on the Hobby Lobby strategy of respectful, law-based change—and now Davis is blowing all that up. Religious exemption enthusiasts and marriage equality advocates don’t share many passions, but respect for Supreme Court precedent—and, underlying that, the rule of law—is usually one of them.

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