By Alan Bean
Hey liberals, lay off of Kim Davis!
It’s not her fault.
Every authority figure in her moral universe is telling her the same thing: God hates gay marriage and God’s will trumps human law.
Kim believes it because everybody she respects is saying it.
There is something noble about the stand she’s taking. Kim isn’t the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks or Dietrich Bonhoeffer; but she thinks she is because Mat Staver, the lead attorney with Liberty Counsel, sees her this way.
Mat Staver isn’t a household name, unless your household lives on the fringes of the culture war. Just prior to the Supreme Courts’ Obergefell decision that made marriage equality a guaranteed right under the US Constitution, Mat Staver was anticipating the worst . . . or, from his perspective, the best.
This would be the thing that revolutions are made of. This could split the country right in two. This could cause another civil war. I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.
In Mat Staver’s imagination, the Kim Davis case is the snowball that will spark the avalanche he is praying for. Mat would love nothing more than to split America in two, essentially reprising the Civil War.
Staver hails from a section of the country where most folks believe the world is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a myth, that the Bible is free from error or contradiction, that men should exercise their God-given authority over women, that gay marriage is the ultimate sin against God, and that states should be free to make and enforce laws in harmony with this Southern consensus.
That’s why Mat Staver is up to his elbows in the fight for teaching “intelligent design” in the nation’s public schools. He will exploit any issue on the fault-line separating pagan and Christian values because his goal is to make the world safe for the conservative Southern consensus.
Kim Davis is often described as an “Apostolic Christian”. Several branches of the Christian family that favor the term “apostolic”, but the reference is most likely to a form of Apostolic Pentecostalism that traces its origins to the New Testament apostles, believes the King James Version of the Bible is the final authority on every subject, and encourages modest clothing while discouraging women from wearing makeup or cutting their hair. (This explains why Kim Davis doesn’t look like most of the women in your office and, while I’m on the subject, her domestic travails are irrelevant to this discussion.)
Kim’s religion explains her opposition to gay marriage, but does it account for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on pain of incarceration? Apostolic Christians have traditionally respected the authority of public officials and Davis would have faced no recrimination from her congregation if she had followed the law, especially if the marriage license business had been delegated to subordinates.
Kim is taking her stand because the authority figures in her world are guided by a revolutionary political-religious-legal philosophy.
Mike Huckabee is in on the game. He calls Kim Davis a civil rights hero who understands the US Constitution better than most liberal politicians (because she has been taught to think in post-revolutionary terms)
Marco Rubio says we should find a way to protect the right of public officials to hold true to their religious views.
In fact, of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates, only two (Carly Fiorina and Lindsey Graham) believe that Kim Davis should do her job or resign.
Jeb Bush doesn’t like where his base is headed, but he can’t say so. Instead, Jeb is praying for a via media to emerge:
“It seems to me there ought to be common ground, there ought to be big enough space for her to act on her conscience and for, now that the law is the law of the land, for a gay couple to be married in whatever jurisdiction that is.”
But there is no middle ground here. The Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution states that when state and federal laws conflict, federal law prevails. As James Madison argued, if the nation had tried to build a society without a supremacy clause of some kind, “it would have seen the authority of the whole society everywhere subordinate to the authority of the parts; it would have seen a monster, in which the head was under the direction of the members”.
Mat Staver disagrees. So do most of the Republican candidates in the presidential race. Although most people haven’t heard of “Dominionism” or “Christian Reconstruction”, or “The New Apostolic Reformation”, the basic assumption at the heart of this complicated movement is beginning to take hold in conservative America.
Dominionism, narrowly defined, has a limited following on the Right, but the basic tenets of this revolutionary worldview are leavening conservative America: the idea of a clearly definable “biblical worldview”, the conception of America as a nation founded by and for Christians; the demonization of the public school system; the assumption that free market capitalism is a biblical concept, a rejection of the theory of biological evolution; and a visceral antipathy to homosexuality and the gay rights movement.
(If you want to learn more about Christian Dominionism, read my primer on the subject, and check out Sarah Posner’s piece on how this philosophy is being taught at Liberty University Law School (Mat Staver’s home base).
Poor Kim Davis doesn’t understand much of this slice of recent history, but her attorney is on the cutting edge of the Dominionist movement and he understands it very, very well. Mat Staver tells Kim that she is a Christian martyr; and Kim believes it. She is a pawn in an enormous chess game that few Americans, conservative or liberal, appear to understand.
In the America described in political science classes and the America that prevails in the courtroom, Kim Davis doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But Mat Staver doesn’t belong to that America. Mat’s heart has been captured by an America that lives on the far side of the revolution.
The scary part is that a huge slice of the Republican base is praying for precisely that revolution.
