The Pope Just Handed Kim Davis A Huge Win

[Tommy_Carcetti]

25. I'm not sure I agree 100% with your police work there, Lou.

From my reading of it, the Pope either a) isn't intimately familiar with the details of the Kim Davis matter, or b) sought to split hairs and sidestep the more controversial aspects of the Davis matter in order to maintain a neutral tone.

He seems like a fairly informed cookie, so my money's on B.

The crux of his statement pertains to contentious objection, that an individual can choose to refrain from engaging in an otherwise mandated activity if he or she believes it violates one's personal beliefs.

The whole thing about the Kim Davis matter is that if she had merely objected on a personal basis, she'd still be some unknown clerk in Kentucky. If, for example, a gay couple had come to her office and requested a marriage license, and she'd quietly excused herself and let one of her deputies handle all the paperwork because she believed issuing the license herself would somehow violate her own religious beliefs, I hardly doubt there'd ever be any newsworthy story that erupted from it. That's classic conscientious objection, just as people who said serving in the military violated their own personal religious beliefs.

Where she went wrong is that she made it an office wide policy to refuse all such applications, clearly contravening judicially affirmed law that would require her office--not her personally--to issue licenses regardless of sexual orientation.

So I don't think the Pope really wanted to rock the boat on the issue, and therefore issued a somewhat vague statement that supported personal conscientious objection while remaining silent on the actual issue of whether Davis had the ability to refuse such action on behalf of the entire clerk's office. Therefore, the conservative wing of his church wouldn't have anything to go on him officially "caving" to the gay marriage issue while he still managed to not actually condone Davis' official actions.