Hey liberals, lay off of Kim Davis!
It’s not her fault.
Every authority figure in her moral universe is telling her the same thing: God hates gay marriage and God’s will trumps human law.
Kim believes it because everybody she respects is saying it.
There is something noble about the stand she’s taking. Kim isn’t the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks or Dietrich Bonhoeffer; but she thinks she is because Mat Staver, the lead attorney with Liberty Counsel, tells her so.
Mat Staver isn’t a household name, unless your household lives on the fringes of the culture war. Just prior to the Supreme Courts’ Obergefell decision that made marriage equality a guaranteed right under the US Constitution, Mat Staver was anticipating the worst . . . or, from his perspective, the best.
This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.
In Mat Staver’s imagination, the Kim Davis case is the snowball that will spark the avalanche he is praying for. Mat would love nothing more than to split America in two, essentially reprising the Civil War.
Staver hails from a section of the country where most folks believe the world is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a myth, that the Bible is free from error or contradiction, that men should exercise their God-given authority over women, that gay marriage is the ultimate sin against God, and that states should be free to make and enforce laws in harmony with this Southern consensus.
That’s why Mat Staver is up to his elbows in the fight for teaching “intelligent design” in the nation’s public schools. He will exploit any issue on the fault-line separating “pagan” and “Christian” values because his goal is to make the world safe for the conservative Southern consensus.
Kim Davis is often described as an “Apostolic Christian”. Several branches of the Christian family that favor the term “apostolic”, but the reference is most likely to a form of Apostolic Pentecostalism that traces its origins to the New Testament apostles, believes the King James Version of the Bible is the final authority on every subject, and encourages modest clothing while discouraging women from wearing makeup or cutting their hair. (This explains why Kim Davis doesn’t look like most of the women in your office and, while I’m on the subject, her domestic travails are irrelevant to this discussion.)
Kim’s religion explains her opposition to gay marriage, but does it account for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on pain of incarceration? Apostolic Christians have traditionally respected the authority of public officials and Davis would have faced no recrimination from her congregation if she had followed the law, especially if the marriage license business had been delegated to subordinates.
Kim is taking her stand because the authority figures in her world are guided by a revolutionary political-religious-legal philosophy. While we’re focusing on Kim we are ignoring the folks behind the scenes who are driving the action.
Mike Huckabee is in on the game. He calls Kim Davis a civil rights hero who understands the US Constitution better than most liberal politicians.
Marco Rubio says we should find a way to protect the right of public officials to hold true to their religious views. What way might that be?
In fact, of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates, only two (Carly Fiorina and Lindsey Graham) believe that Kim Davis should do her job or resign.
Jeb Bush doesn’t like where his base is headed, but he can’t say so. Instead, Jeb is praying for a via media to emerge:
“It seems to me there ought to be common ground, there ought to be big enough space for her to act on her conscience and for, now that the law is the law of the land, for a gay couple to be married in whatever jurisdiction that is.”
But there is no middle ground here. The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution states that when state and federal laws conflict, federal law prevails. As James Madison argued, if the nation had tried to build a society without a supremacy clause of some kind, “it would have seen the authority of the whole society everywhere subordinate to the authority of the parts; it would have seen a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members”.
Mat Staver disagrees. So do most of the Republican candidates in the presidential race. Although most people haven’t heard of “Dominionism” or “Christian Reconstruction”, or “The New Apostolic Reformation”, the basic assumption at the heart of this complicated movement is beginning to take hold in conservative America.
Dominionism, narrowly defined, has a limited following on the Right, but the basic tenets of this revolutionary worldview are leavening conservative America: the notion that there is a clearly definable “biblical worldview”, the conception of America as a nation founded by and for Christians; the demonization of the public school system; the assumption that free market capitalism is a biblical concept, a rejection of the theory of biological evolution; and a visceral antipathy to homosexuality and the gay rights movement.
(If you want to learn more about Christian Dominionism, read my primer on the subject, and check out Sarah Posner’s piece on how this philosophy is being taught at Liberty University Law School (Mat Staver’s home base).
Poor Kim Davis doesn’t understand much of this slice of recent history, but her attorney is on the cutting edge of the Dominionist movement and he understands it very, very well. Mat Staver tells Kim that she is a Christian martyr; and Kim believes it. She is a pawn in an enormous chess game that few Americans, conservative or liberal, appear to understand.
Ted Cruz, like his dear old dad, is a committed dominionist. That’s why he is auditioning to be regarded as Kim Davis’s biggest fan.
“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny,” he said. “Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith. . . . I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally.”
Ted is fully aware that none of this makes sense if we are playing by the secular interpretation of constitutional law that currently drives the American legal system. But Ted is marching to a different drummer; talking and thinking as if the dominionist revolution was already over and the Supreme Court can be trumped by biblical teaching (as interpreted by people like Mat Staver). If people like Cruz repeat their talking points loud enough and long enough, people like Kim Davis will begin to believe it.
Kim the County Clerk is surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses repeating the same talking points.
In the America described in political science classes and the America that prevails in the courtroom, Kim Davis doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But Mat Staver doesn’t belong to that America. Mat’s heart has been captured by an America that lives on the far side of the revolution.
But we’re not paying attention to Mat Staver, his friends at Liberty Counsel, and the dominionist movement that shapes their thinking. We’re arguing about the merits and demerits of a simple county clerk who is being manipulated for ideological purposes.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
Chris Hayes interviewed Kim Davis’ attorney on MSNBC last night. He repeatedly asked if county clerk was convinced on religious grounds that interracial marriage is against God’s law, could that person be excused from granting a marriage license to an interracial couple. The attorney (I think it was Staver) dodged the question as long as Chris asked it. Dominionism would turn us into a theocracy rivaling that of ISIS.
Nice hokey alarmist diatribe. It fails to account for the fact that there IS a “middle ground,” if anyone could be bothered to pursue it: The well established policy of “reasonable accommodation.” If da gubmint really wants an amicable solution, all it needs to do is find or legislatively create a way for the clerk’s deputies to, in cases of conflict of conscience, issue the license in her stead, *without* her name or authority in any way attached.
But of course da gubmint doesn’t really want that. It wants the confrontation as much as do the Dominionists. It’s seeking more ways and excuses to limit the First Freedom.
Well said, Alan. The obsession with this case–and the assumption that jail time is an appropriate response–makes me weary. This reflexive response is why we have the globe’s largest prison population.
The FLAT EARTH SOCIETY is stirring.
Of course, it’s her fault that she’s taking part in a seditious activity; that she hasn’t recognized that others, like gays, don’t want her faith to be imposed on them; that her particular religion has not “won” this civil war brought on by the desire of gays to have the same rights as others under the Constitution and anti-gay stunk-in-the-muds who think that their resistance is like MLK’s civil disobedience.
Just because this attorney is using her doesn’t mean she bears no responsibility for her action and is the proximate cause of her own imprisonment.
Possibly the best piece I’ve read yet on the Kim Davis circus. This is another move in the game for Christian privilege and supremacy, and the propaganda that resisting this privileged perch is an oppressive denial of religious liberty. Alan is correct that we should not focus on Clerk Davis and miss the true players – Staver and his fellow Dominionists.
Give Kim Davis a break? Hell no! She broke her oath of office and subverted the Constitution. She is Apostolic, and Apostolics are infected with Dominion theology. She is a traitor and should be treated as such!
One Dominionist leader visits a Dominionist foot soldier in jail and Kim Davis supporters, Dominionist all, rally in front of the jail. All those Dominionists in one place. What a perfect opportunity to take them all out.
You will never defeat the Dominionists through peaceful means. They will never give up, and they will never go away on their own. Dominionism is a clear and present danger that needs a more proper response: Confrontation. What is needed to confront Dominionism head on and defeat it is a body, an organization of like-minded people who understand this danger and is willing to come together to stop it. It needs to be a movement against Dominionism, with teeth, willing to scrap with Dominionists head on, eye-ball to eye-ball and toe-to-toe, uncompromising, unmerciful, and with the gumption and will to do what is necessary to stop them. The Dominionists are at war with Secular America. It is time that people clearly understand that and act accordingly. We need to go to war with our enemy: Dominionism.
When you understand that the undermining and subversion of the U.S. Constitution is essental to the establishment of a fascist Christian theocratic state, then you will completely understand what this is really all about. This is the face of Dominionism. Understand also that their goal is not only to establish a theocracy, but to also eliminate all who oppose them or are different from them.