The Vengeful God of Kim Davis: The Powerful Forces We Ignore When We Fixate on One Kentucky Clerk
But here’s the thing. There are our moral quibbles with Kim Davis’ belief system and then there are our legal quibbles with it. I have both. Fear (and misguided thinking) can cause one to believe that upholding a person’s basic civil rights amounts to a condoning of their choices. But these moral panics only happen around issues of sexual regulation. We are society that believes that even mass murderers deserve defense attorneys. We do not equate the providing of legal representation with the condoning of crime. It is about the basic protection of rights. The idea that those who issue marriage licenses must agree with the romantic choices of those getting married is patently absurd. There are clear distinctions to be made about marriage as a civil institution, which is open to all, and marriage as a religious institution, which is regulated by individual churches and religious traditions.
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Kim Davis and all her antics, not to mention her eclectic intimate choices, are low-hanging fruit. The moral and political chicanery of conservative evangelical Christianity is the real problem here. Fifty years ago, white evangelicals believed that black people were the children of Ham, and that they were therefore cursed and morally conscripted to lives of less value than those of white people. In the 1960s, county clerks were the first line of assault on the dignity and personhood of black people, come to exercise their right to vote.
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…The fear-based theology that makes evangelicals feel justified in denying other people’s rights is not unlike the fear-based political rhetoric that drives much of America’s foreign policy and terrorizing of brown people all over the world. The belief in a God who has favorites, a God who only blesses straight, middle-class, white Americans in traditional marriages, is the stuff that “manifest destiny” is made of.
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