“There’s a judge in Oregon who has stopped performing marriages since the Supreme Court ruling. There was a judge in Texas who stopped performing marriages as a protest against the fact that (at the time) same sex marriage was illegal.”
I think you are confusing a judge with a justice of the peace. Judges have the right to marry people and in most places it is no different than a mayor or politician with that power, it is a token of their power but they don’t have to exercise it, whereas JP’s are a functionary tasked with marrying people, there is a big difference.
“We had clerks in San Francisco who gave out same sex marriage licenses when it was against the law. They were not prosecuted for doing what at the time was illegal. Now we have…(you get the drift).”
Yeah, Fox News logic, conflating Kim Davis (who refused to do her job, and defied a federal court order), with Gavin Newsome, who issued same sex marriage license based on a legal claim that the state constitution didn’t allow discrimination like that, he had a legal basis for his actions (unlike Kim Davis, who had only her twisted version of the Bible as her reason). Newsome, because he was citing a legal principle, was not breaking the law, because he was saying the law itself was invalid. It went to court, and the court ruled that Newsome’s argument was wrong, told him to stop, and he did…which Kim Davis did not do.
It is interesting watching the supporters try to conflate apples and pears as being the same. Davis was jailed because a judge said she didn’t have the right to do what she was doing, not because she refused to issue the licenses. If when the court had spoken, she had said she would obey, she wouldn’t have gone to to jail, the way Gavin Newsome didn’t go to jail because he listened. Tating, you have to learn that the law isn’t what people say it should be, the law is what the courts say it is. Newsome had legal grounds to do what he did, by citing the California constitution, he didn’t claim Jesus told him to do it, or the flying spaghetti monster, he cited the law and basically said that the same sex marriage ban was illegal, unconstitutional. When a court says your argument doesn’t hold water, then you are violating the law but since Newsome stopped, he was fine.
Davis is grandstanding, you can bet some of the heavy hitters in the religious right campaign to make the US a theocracy are probably paying her to be their martyr, in fact I would bet on it. Davis isn’t looking for an accomodation, she is looking to become a hero to all the real american types like her, start a revolution, but what she is really doing is making people like herself look small and mean.
