Here’s a sequel to a news story from September 2015.
Kim Davis, a lowly county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
You can probably already guess why, even if you don’t remember the case. Davis, an evangelical Christian and a social conservative, didn’t agree with the new state policy of recognizing same-sex marriages.
Davis was taken away in handcuffs and briefly jailed. Meanwhile, the marriage licenses were issued by other county employees.
The resultant brouhaha became an international news story for a time. I remember this well, perhaps because I live in neighboring Ohio.
I also remember concluding that Davis was in the wrong—on technical grounds, at least. When I worked in the private sector for a Fortune 500 corporation, I didn’t always agree with my employer’s policies. But I always acted in accordance with company policy. Because that’s what having a job is all about.
My private-sector employer had no authority over me beyond the workplace. When your employer is a branch of the government, however, the stakes are higher. For a government employee, the employer is the law. This means that violation of a policy, even for reasons of conscience, may make an employee a lawbreaker. Kim Davis broke the law, even though she was following her conscience.
Kim Davis was not the first American dissenter to oppose a government policy through peaceful noncompliance with the law. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) refused to pay his taxes during the 1840s. Thoreau did not want to provide the federal government with material support for the Mexican-American War, which he saw as unjust.
Like Kim Davis seventeen decades later, Thoreau was briefly jailed for his actions, or non-actions. Thoreau’s experiences became the basis for his essay, “Civil Disobedience”, which you may recall from high school.
Thoreau’s opponents in the 1840s saw the Mexican-American War as progress, an instrument of America’s manifest destiny. Manifest destiny was the idea that America had a God-given right and duty to expand its borders, even at the expense of other peoples and nations.
In the 1840s, the dominant political establishment was just as focused on manifest destiny as the establishment is now focused on all things LGBTQ.
Perhaps Thoreau’s ultimate, unintended lesson is that you can’t fight city hall. Despite Thoreau’s act of civil disobedience, manifest destiny won the day in the 1840s. The federal government was victorious in its war with Mexico. Fifty-five percent of Mexico’s territory was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Kim Davis’s act of civil disobedience did not have any real effect on the inevitable outcome, either. What was the net result in Rowan County, after all? Everyone got their marriage licenses. Other government employees simply signed the necessary documents.
But what about the punishment meted out to this modern-day Thoreau of Rowan County, Kentucky?
Kim Davis was fired for her civil disobedience. And since she had willingly become a county employee, Davis deserved to be fired.
But jailed and financially ruined?
Consider, for a moment, the crimes that won’t earn you jail time. A few years ago, the city council of San Francisco decriminalized thefts up to $950. In New York City, there have been documented cases of violent felons being released because of court backlogs and overcrowded jails. But there shall be no mercy for a Kentucky county clerk who refuses to sign a marriage license.
Then came the endless lawsuits. Of course, the lawyers saw an opportunity to enrich themselves.
Nine years later, a federal judge has ordered Davis to pay a group of lawyers $260,104 in fees and expenses. This is in addition to $100,000 in damages that she’s been ordered to pay a same-sex couple who sued.
That’s $360,104 in total. For refusing to sign documents in a government office in a rural Kentucky county.
The aim—and the effective outcome—of all these measures is to ruin Kim Davis, to permanently pauperize her.
Once again, I’m not defending Kim Davis’s original actions. There should have been consequences for her (termination of employment). She did not deserve all of this.
Let’s return to this question of progress. I’ll remind you that in the 1840s, manifest destiny was seen as progress, “the right side of history”. By some. In 2015, some people believed (and still do) that changing the millennia-old nature of marriage is progress.
Henry David Thoreau would be remembered differently today if he had expressed his opposition to the Mexican-American War through violence. But Thoreau didn’t blow up a US Army ammunition depot. He withheld his taxes.
Kim Davis’s case would be different had she crashed a same-sex wedding, rather than simply withholding her signature. Her noncompliance, like Thoreau’s noncompliance in the 1840s, was largely a symbolic crime.
Another word for symbolic might be ideological in this context. Here’s another lesson from history: when a nation is lurching toward dictatorship, it is ideological crimes that are punished the most harshly, without any sense of reason or proportion.
This is where we must depart from Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau did not have to cope with the twenty-first-century zeal of weaponized ideological conformity. Weaponized ideological conformity has its roots in the French Revolution, and the violent leftist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Forced ideological conformity has its roots in the USSR and Nazi Germany.
The imposition of ideological conformity requires public examples. The nonconforming must be thoroughly broken in a public manner. This will dissuade anyone else who might speak out, or engage in similar dissent.
Kim Davis, to her detriment, volunteered to become a public example when she refused to sign marriage licenses for a while in rural Kentucky. Her real crime had little to do with paperwork, and everything to do with her unwillingness to affirmatively embrace the government’s new ideological orthodoxy.
Davis’s fate was a sign of things to come. Less than a decade later, teachers have been fired for failing to publicly affirm that gender is malleable, and can be arbitrarily altered by using different pronouns.
But in the case of Kim Davis, at least, the state accomplished its aims. To the best of my knowledge, no government employee has repeated her particular act of civil disobedience since.
-ET