What do we call it when someone is forced to provide labor against his will?
We call it slavery. And homosexual activists are determined to resurrect it in the South and everywhere else.
Case in point: Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis is refusing to issue sodomy-based wedding licenses to gay couples. In so doing, she is honoring the Kentucky state constitution and her own conscience.
But a federal judge, David Bunning, is ordering her to violate her own deeply held religious principles or go to jail. Bunning wrote that her liberty is limited to the freedom “to believe (emphasis mine) that marriage is a union between one man and one woman.”
But the First Amendment does not protect Ms. Davis’ right to “believe” the principles of her Christian faith; it guarantees her right to practice the principles of her Christian faith, to freely exercise her Christian faith.
In truth, it is Judge Bunning who is the transgressor here.
He is violating the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits the federal government from interfering with the free exercise of religion. Whatever else he is doing, he is grossly interfering with Ms. Davis and her freedom to live according to her religious faith in the public square.
Judge Bunning joins Ms. Davis’ secularist critics who argue the solution is simple: if her faith doesn’t allow her to fulfill her duties, she should be forced out of her job. They seem oblivious to the reality that Judge Bunning’s ruling thus violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which plainly states that Americans cannot be discriminated against in employment on the basis of religion.
As Judge Bunning wrote, "[H]er religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County Clerk.”
Well, for one thing, she never took an oath to obey the Supreme Court. She took an oath to uphold the Constitution of Kentucky, which prohibits gay marriage, and the Constitution of the United States, which doesn’t guarantee a right to homosexual marriage anywhere. She is actually fulfilling her oath of office while Judge Bunning is violating his.
Ms. Davis’ fight is a critically important one for the future of this country. If Christians are not allowed conscientious objector status on matters of deeply held religious principle, every Christian in America will be driven out of public service altogether.
We will end up with a country in which every civic office will be held by militant atheists or secular fundamentalists who have nothing but disdain for the Declaration of Independence and its reference to the Creator as the source of our civil liberties. Every public sector job opening will have a “Christians need not apply” message printed in bold face on the top of the application. That’s not the country the Founders bequeathed us.
And there is an additional problem for Judge Bunning and our secular fundamentalist friends: Ms. Davis would be driven out of public service for failing a religious test for public office. Judge Bunning is saying, in essence, that Ms. Davis’ religion prohibits her from public service.
Thus the same folks who are driving her from the public square are the same folks who constantly bleat in other circumstances that you must not impose a religious test on anyone, anywhere, for any public office whatsoever.
So Judge Bunning is not only violating the First Amendment, he is violating Article VI of the Constitution by imposing a “religious test” on Ms. Davis as a condition of holding a position of public trust.
Bunning also compounds his judicial malfeasance by violating the 13th Amendment, which plainly and unambiguously prohibits “involuntary servitude” anywhere in the United States. “Servitude” means providing a service to somebody else, and “involuntary” means doing it against your will. Well, it is against Ms. Davis’ will to issue a wedding license that honors behavior which, according to Scripture, is an abomination in the eyes of God.
I have proclaimed from the very beginning of the debate over homosexual marriage that the clash between religious liberty and homosexual rights is a zero-sum game. One side will win and the other side will lose, period. It is impossible to have both religious liberty and homosexual marriage. America will have to choose between homosexuality and religious liberty, because we can only have one or the other.
The sooner we as a country wake up to that stark reality the better. Folks naively want to believe we can have both, but we can’t. Every single advance of the homosexual lobby comes at the expense of religious liberty. Ms. Davis is living proof.
And so the ugliness of slavery is being brought back to the Confederate States of America by homosexual activists and their slave-driving collaborators on the federal bench.
The Dred Scott ruling, alas, has been resurrected from its judicial grave and is now being used as a cudgel against people of faith.
Judge Bunning’s father famously threw a perfect game in 1964. The son, sadly, has been called out on strikes. First Amendment, strike one. Article VI, strike two. Thirteenth Amendment, strike three. And for good measure, he took a swing and a miss at the Civil Rights Act.
Bottom line: Judge Bunning is Roger Taney and Kim Davis is Dred Scott. In Bunning’s warped judicial view, the Christian has no rights which the liberal man is bound to respect.
