– September 4, 2015

A pathetic standoff has finally come to an inglorious end in Kentucky, where Rowan County clerk Kim Davis has been thrown into the slammer for her utterly contemptuous refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Thankfully, the rule of law has prevailed over false theologies of bigotry and virulent intolerance.

One Christian author summed the entire wretched saga up in one fiercely succinct tweet: “No one’s being jailed for practicing her religion. Someone’s being jailed for using the government to force others to practice her religion.”

And that’s the TOTAL crux of the issue. While hordes of Religious Right apologists have rallied around Davis as a sort of latter-day martyr being thrown to the lions by secular tyrants pursuing some rabid homosexual agenda, the simple issue is that the bright and rational dividing line separating church from state is the U.S. Constitution itself, as construed by our United States Supreme Court, the highest law of the land.

However, with commentaries and memes flowing faster than the speed of sound, one angle of the tempest in Rowan County has gone virtually ignored by the media – and those are the genuine national security implications for our brave men and women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF, the civil rights organization that I head) regularly grapples with similar scenarios whereby fundamentalist Christian officers, NCOs, chaplains, and civilian leaders within the armed forces shove their weaponized Christianity down the throats of their helpless subordinates, Constitutional religious protections and the Uniform Code of Military Justice be damned. Just as the Rowan County “deputy clerks were too afraid to disagree with Davis to issue same-sex marriage licenses,” fearing the loss of their jobs, servicemen and women across the globe remain afraid to defy their superiors lest they invite some form of career-ending retribution or otherwise draconian payback and rapacious reprisal.

It’s no accident that Davis’s enablers and allies like the anti-LGBT hate group Liberty Counsel, who gave the original advice to not issue licenses and subsequently are representing her in court, are frequent foes of MRFF.

Nevertheless, Americans can rest assured that just as Liberty Counsel and their religious extremist ilk were losers last week, losers they shall remain. The Constitutional basis of their litigation is non-existent, no matter how much they attempt to lean on the flimsy argument of “state’s rights,” a tattered canard typically honed by the KKK and other rabid neo-confederate revanchists who zealously uphold racism, bigotry, prejudice, and oppression.

All of this bodes quite well for our servicemembers who are straining under the weight of illicit Christian proselytizing and the smuggling of fundamentalist contraband into the daily lives of active duty Sailors, Soldiers, Marines, Airmen, Cadets, Midshipmen, National Guard and Reserve personnel, Coast Guard men and women and Veterans. Indeed, past successes by MRFF have proven how the law CAN be successfully leveraged in defense of true religious freedom (and freedom from religion).

Even the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dr. Albert Mohler, understands that church-state separation within the armed services is of fundamental importance to our character as a nation, noting that the questions arising from Rowan County “will eventually extend to…anyone wearing the uniform of the United States military”.

Thank you for your words, Dr. Mohler – on that score, you’re correct. Now let’s hope that you and your coreligionists learn the most important lesson of the fracas in Rowan County, namely the high cost of refusing to yield to THE LAW when one is hopelessly stuck on the wrong side of history.

Share this page: