One of the leading figures in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, AKA the Mormons, has weighed into the debate on whether public officials should be exempted from duties when they conflict with their faiths and he says they should just do the job they were hired for.

Elder Dallin H Oaks, one of the Mormon Church’s council of Twelve Apostles, made the comments in a speech to a conference of Mormon clergy in Sacremento, California, on Tuesday.

In the speech, ‘The Boundary Between Church and State’ Oaks referenced his own experience on both sides of the divide between church and state.

Prior to becoming a religious leader Oaks was a lawyer and rose as high as a Utah Supreme Court justice after a career as a law clerk and prosecutor in the state of Illinois.

Public officials, Oaks said, ‘take an oath to support the constitution and laws of their jurisdiction.’

‘That oath does not leave them free to use their official position to further their personal beliefs – religious or otherwise – to override the law.’

‘Office holders remain free to draw upon their personal beliefs and motivations and advocate their positions in the public square. But when acting as public officials they are not free to apply personal convictions — religious or other — in place of the defined responsibilities of their public offices.’

Oaks then went on to references cases like that of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis who went to jail rather than perform her duty to same-sex couples who were seeking legal marriage licenses.

‘A county clerk’s recent invoking of religious reasons to justify refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples violates this principle,’ Oaks said.

The speech is a stark turnaround on same-sex marriage from when the Mormon church drew criticism for bankrolling the Prop 8 ballot initiative that saw same-sex marriage banned in California between 2008 and 2013.