JAILING Kim Davis for five nights has made her a misleading martyr to a misguided cause. Ms Davis is a clerk in Kentucky who adamantly refused to dispense marriage licences to same-sex couples. Her offence—to break the law in order to preserve her conscience—was even more wrongheaded than her punishment. Though she is now free again, her supporters, including several Republican presidential candidates who ought to know better, see her brief incarceration as the brutal triumph of secular tyranny. They exaggerate both Ms Davis’s nobility and the threat faced by Christian America.

After the Supreme Court in effect legalised same-sex marriage throughout the country in June, several local officials—among them Ms Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky—stopped supplying marriage licences to any couples, gay or straight. She was sued; she lost, predictably and repeatedly. When, after a convoluted legal process, she still refused to comply, she was judged to be in contempt of court and locked up. For all the adulation it has garnered, her stance is deeply confused, not least because issuing licences to pairs of men or women who want to get hitched would not imply her moral approval of their unions. It would signify only that the couples had met the legal requirements for marriage. Ms Davis is fully entitled to her horror, but it is irrelevant to her duties.

If that distinction failed her, she should have resigned, as others in her position have (since her post is elected, she cannot easily be sacked). She might even have stayed out of jail by letting her deputies process the offending paperwork in her stead (and might go back inside if she prevents them doing so now). That choice does not amount to a tyrannical imposition on her freedom. It simply means that, as a public official, she is bound to uphold the law. To compare her recalcitrance, as some admirers have, to the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, or to the 19th-century figures who declined to return runaway slaves, is absurd.

Absurd because, unlike slavery or segregation, gay marriage is almost completely victimless. Therein lies another fallacy of Ms Davis’s martyrdom: she makes it seem that Christians have been persecuted by the Supreme Court’s ruling, directly and en masse, when, in reality, only a few have been inconvenienced (and many more gay Christians stand to benefit). There is a difficult question about whether the handful of devout bakers and florists who would prefer not to cater to same-sex nuptials should be compelled to. The law must either require shopkeepers to treat everyone alike or condone their intolerance—equality is surely better. Meanwhile, despite much scaremongering to the contrary, those pastors who do not wish to oversee such ceremonies are already exempt. Ms Davis’s predicament is not only self-inflicted. It is also wholly unrepresentative.

Victim complex

Still, the furore in Kentucky shows the extent to which some Christian Americans feel besieged by what they perceive as a strangulating godlessness. Given the freshness of the gay-marriage ruling, perhaps that paranoia is understandable. The truth, though, is that Americans’ freedom to practise their faiths is robustly defended by both the constitution and federal law (see article). The rights of the godly are actually much more secure than those of gay Americans—who still lack federal protection from prejudice like that granted to other groups by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In most states of America homophobes can still legally discriminate against homosexuals, married or otherwise. That is a much graver scandal than Ms Davis’s theatrical refusal to do her job.