Posted on 06/28/2015 12:41:06 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Sen. Ted Cruz is ready to rain on the parade of Texas citizens celebrating the Supreme Court decision on Friday to legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country.
On Saturday, the 2016 Republican presidential candidate said he “absolutely” believes that his state’s country clerks should deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples if they have a religious objection, in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
“Ours is a country that was built by men and women fleeing religious oppression,” Cruz told the newspaper, “and you look at the foundation of this country—it was to seek out a new land where anyone of us could worship the Lord God Almighty with all of our hearts, minds and souls, without government getting in the way.” …
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
I would guess in the case of state activist kritocrats taking things into their own hands and trying to legislate from the bench at state level.
I said the following on another thread, to flesh out the thought. Texas is treating the ruling as legitimate.
The other point was raised to illuminate that resolution of this constitutional crisis can take more than one path. The path selected, so far, is to pit individual religious liberty against the constitutional right to homosexual marriage. That approach adds legitimacy to the SCOTUS ruling, because it takes a view that there is a constitutional right to homosexual marriage. In other words, the path to resolution involves obedience to the law.
But if one adopts a point of view that the ruling is flat out wrong, illegitimate, or whatever you want to call it, and holds that there is no constitutional right to homosexual marriage, no matter what SCOTUS has to say on the subject, then the path to resolution looks like civil disobedience.
Not disagreeing with regard to the Supreme Court having decided to make rather than interpret laws. I’m frankly not sure what the best way is to handle this.
I’m glad I’m not a county official responsible for registering marriages. Thousands of those clerks are going to have to make decisions, knowing that whatever they do could cost them a great deal more than they counted on when they signed up for what’s ordinarily a pretty routine job.
Don’t know, but I’d guess the same principle is already operative with, for example, a Muslim bureaucrat inspecting pork or issuing a liquor license or whatever.
If not, this could be opening up a dangerous precedent, but since we seem to have to have such “accommodations” in private hiring, it would be surprising if we don’t with government employees.
What happens if no government employee in a county believes in gay marriage sufficiently to step in in this employee’s place? Then I’d guess the county would have to hire someone else to do it—or maybe there’d then be a hardship provision by which they can compel an employee to act—or get another job.
Yes, I agree, this presents an untenable can of worms—though I don’t actually know whether it’s already been opened or not.
Not having anyone willing to sign the documents is a very realistic possibility in conservative rural counties.
There are work-arounds which would respect the conscience of circuit court clerks who have sincere religious objections. (More below on that.)
My worry is that the liberals are not stupid. They have had plenty of time to think these things through. What will happen if some rural county somewhere tries to accommodate sincerely held religious convictions, inconveniences a homosexual couple by making them wait a day until a clerk is available, gets sued, loses the lawsuit, and sets a precedent which removes the accommodation for everyone else?
Here's an example of how this could work. The smallest county in our four-county circuit has only two people in their circuit clerk's office, the elected clerk and his deputy. On the other hand, two of our four counties are fairly large and one of those is in a university town. I am certain at least one deputy clerk somewhere in the circuit is willing to do the paperwork.
I suppose the circuit judges could arrange for a deputy clerk willing to do the paperwork to be sent to a county where a homosexual couple wanted a marriage license, on a basis comparable to judges being sent from one county to another within the circuit when conflicts of interest happen, or even obtaining a deputy clerk from outside the circuit if no clerk anywhere in the circuit will do this.
That could work, but only if the homosexuals consider that to be a legitimate accommodation to the beliefs of those who disagree.
Will that happen? Recent history with bakers, florists, and pizza shops does not give reason for optimism.
Here's a worst-case scenario.
With the exception of Poland, where the Roman Catholic Church was so strong that the Communist Party was forced to let practicing Catholics into government, most civil service positions in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China were closed to practicing Christians, either by outright prohibitions on Christians or by requiring people to agree to do things which sincere believers could not do, leading to a situation in which liberal Christians and people who didn't take their beliefs seriously could cooperate with government but sincere believers could not. Similar issues existed for Jewish people in the former Soviet Union, where observant Orthodox Jews faced severe problems but secular Jews sometimes rose to significant positions in government.
I don't think most American liberals think that way, at least not yet. Churches have had a very long history in “progressive” and liberal causes, and most secular liberals know enough black evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics to regard them as well-meaning people, even if they don't agree.
But it's quite possible the hard-core leftists have something like that on their agenda, i.e., driving people out of government service who can't conscientiously accept certain things.
One idea that I think is best is to get the government out of marriage altogether. I've seen two hints that Alabama is moving in that direction. There is no requirement that government conduct marriages or keep track of them. Doing them for NOBODY is equal treatment under the law.
People who want a wedding will then do so on their own dime at their own time.
This editorial is ridiculous. Yes usually makes sense, but expecting individual county clerk’s to form the resistance to this law is not a realistic plan.
As a public employee you don’t have a right to refuse to serve people because of your religious beliefs. Could a moslem county clerk refuse to issue dog licenses? Could a Hindu refuse to issue business licenses to a hamburger joint?
Clerk’s who can’t do their jobs because of their religion should resign.
Cruz is a national leader, not a country leader. A Constitutional Amendment is the only way to reverse this bad ruling, that’s what Cruz should be focused on
You miss the absolute disaster that the SCOTUS two most recent decisions are. We are in waters we have not sailed since the early 19th century.
And nullification is on the table once again, whether you like it or not.
Agreed about solemnization of marriages. But at least under Missouri law, and probably the laws of most other states, only a very small number of county officials are authorized to do the paperwork to issue the license and then records the marriage in the official records. In at least one of our adjoining counties, there are a grand total of two people in the entire county who can do so -- the elected circuit court clerk and his deputy clerk.
There are work-arounds. Even in the smallest counties, another county employee outside the circuit court clerk's office could be trained and deputized to handle marriage licenses. If absolutely nobody is willing to do the paperwork, a deputy clerk could be brought in from another county.
I tend to agree. But Senator Cruz is a lawyer and he has spent decades dealing with the courts. Surely he knows many clerks, and knows this is absolutely not the job that these people signed up to do.
Many of these deputy clerks are young women in essentially secretarial roles; the older ones in supervisory positions are often grandmotherly types.
Stranger things have happened in history. Maybe we're about to see a huge revolt of young women and elderly matrons taking action and "growing a pair" when our mostly-male political class did nothing.
Is Senator Cruz's goal to have lots of clerks protesting in the streets, shouting that homosexual activists have declared a war on women? It might make a great sound bite and photo op, but I'm not sure it will work.
Senator Cruz must have thought this through before making his proposal. Perhaps Texas clerks are made of tough stuff willing to risk jail time. I surely hope he has an idea what to do if he's going to put lots of women in their 20s and 50s on the front lines of this fight.
The process then, as I understand you to be saying,
a. apply/appear for license
b. paperwork processed by county
c. marriage solemnized/finalized
d. paperwork finalized.
I’m not trying to be a legalist, but WHEN is the marriage actually performed? For me, it’s step ‘c’. Whether a justice of the peace there at the county offices or by a solemnizer. Without that step there is no marriage on record.
However, I can see some Christians objecting to being a part of steps b through d in any way.
Better to have no one in the county office involved in this in any way other than if there is a contract between two people about inheritance, visitation, power of attorney, etc. and there’s some requirement to file this kind of contract as they do other kinds of contracts.
For example, can I contract with a bank to pay on a car without the county being involved in that contract?
Chaos has been imposed from on high; the the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President all regularly, routinely, casually flout the law. I'm not sure exactly when we ceased to be a nation of law, and became a nation of anarchic tyranny ... but the Supreme Court declared us such on January 22, 1973. The recent '0bamacare' and sodomite decisions are simply further evidence that the law is simply a tool for oppression in this country.
Article V.
State laws differ, but recording of a deed will almost always require involvement of the county or some other unit of government. Same for recording a marriage.
I am honestly not clear what I think about recording that marriage. An argument could be made that recording a second marriage of an adulterous spouse is also sinful. And if that’s the case, we have a much bigger problem than homosexual marriages.
The deputy clerk involved in the article I posted happens to be a conservative Anglican and has views of marriage which come from a theological tradition different from me, so I’m not comfortable explaining the details of her view. But for someone from a church owing its origins to Henry VIII, I can see why recording marriages involving serious sin short of homosexuality would not be as much of a concern as it would be to many conservative evangelicals or Roman Catholics.
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