Response to The Eye of Some Tiger or Other

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Eye of Some Tiger or Other)

I never really listened to all the words, but I always assumed "Eye of the Tiger" meant "Have the courage to look the tiger in the eye", just a metaphor for "Be bold!" Still, I find it odd the people who created that song keep stopping Conservatives from using it, since I'da thunk whoever wrote that song was a Conservative anyway, since those are the people who seem to like it so much.

This situation Kim Davis (a Democrat, surprisingly!) forced her way into really ought to be so simple that I'm a little surprised she was able to pull it off, except of course that there are just too many people who like that it happened this way, especially with that coming-out-of-jail dog-and-pony show, striking a triumphant pose with her arms up to the sky and giving glory to God, seemingly for making all this foolishness come about.

The truth is, of course, that this has absolutely nothing to do with someone making her marry gay people, since all that she's being asked to do in issuing a marriage license with her name on it is to certify the couple has met the state's qualifications to get married. If she wants to refuse to marry these people, she should quit the county job and go work for a church, where she can refuse to marry gay people to her heart's content, and get away with it! That, of course, assumes any gays would apply, which is not all that likely.

But that's the point, isn't it? I mean, where would be the fun in doing it legally? The plan, after all, is to piss off someone who's trying to do something that God doesn't like. And skipping over the fact that God is not on her county's table of organization, there's this other problem:

How does she know what God really likes?

Her answer, I'm pretty sure, would be, she knows this from her religious convictions -- which, by the way, totally infringe on the religious convictions of citizens of the county who believe that God actually wants people of the same gender to marry each other, and others who are personally convinced that God doesn't care either way, and others still who believe God doesn't exist, and maybe others who say they don't know if God exists, and maybe don't even care, since there's no law in the state of Kentucky, or any other state, that says you have to be a believer in God to get married.

The main point here being that the nice thing about living in a secular country is that your government doesn't tell its citizens what to think about God, because if it did, it might try to make you believe something that you don't actually believe. So instead of doing that, our governments in this country just shut their mouths when it comes to God, leaving it up to you to do all your God-worshiping in some church, or even at home.

So whether she knows it or not, her deeply-held religious belief is just one of a cornucopia of beliefs out there that all sort of compete with one another, but which, technically, all have nothing to do with getting a marriage license in the state of Kentucky anyway.

Some disagree, including Ryan T. Anderson, in his September 7th New York Times Op-Ed, in which he argues we should look for ways of accommodating these religious objectors:

Do we really want to say that an otherwise competent employee must quit or go to jail if there is another alternative?

Anderson -- who is described as a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation; make of that what you will -- goes on to praise the state of North Carolina for finding those alternatives:

Sensing that the Supreme Court might redefine marriage, the North Carolina Legislature passed a law earlier in June creating a system to accommodate — as far as possible — the conscientious beliefs of magistrates who objected to performing same-sex marriages and clerks who objected to issuing licenses. 

The North Carolina law made clear that no eligible couple could be denied a marriage license, but officials could recuse themselves should they have sincere objections. By notifying a superior of their objection ahead of time, the clerks could protect their rights of conscience while ensuring that no couple would be inconvenienced.

That wouldn't work at all in Kim Davis' Rowan County, by the way, since, she being the head clerk, there was nobody above her to appeal to, meaning that anyone who wanted to get married in her county had to drive, in some cases for hours, to some other county. In any event, there's also that question of whether citizens should be denied services they pay their government to deliver, just because the person assigned to do that job decides, for some reason, that she doesn't want to.

But it's different if her reason is faith-based?

How about the case of the city bus driver who happens to be Amish, and therefore refuses to drive a bus, since church rules prohibit it. Should the citizens of that city be compelled to continue paying her salary, just because her religious beliefs prevent her from doing her job?

In fact, religious liberty protections for Kim Davis already exist. Nobody's forcing her do anything that actually violates her religious conscience in the first place -- it's not like she's a priest and she's being forced to marry gays, which is not what the law demands anyway. And if she imagines that her religion tells her that issuing a marriage license means something more than the state says it does, she has a choice; either do her job, or quit it, and maybe go work for that church.

There's also this explanation she gave couples who applied for licenses and asked her under who's authority she was refusing:

Davis turned them away, saying she was acting “under God’s authority”.

Her claiming that she is a direct report to some deity (and particularly one who seems a tad homophobic), rather than to the state of Kentucky, it seems to me, is a flat-out violation of the 1st Amendment prohibition of the state establishing a church, in which case, it was not her constitutionally-protected religious freedom that has been infringed, it's that of all those people she turned away.