The saga of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who went to jail for a
weekend rather than sign off on same-sex marriage certificates, might
seem like it’s a last gasp for the anti-gay right; an attempt to eke out
some kind of victory after having lost their two-decade fight against
same-sex marriage. Unable to stop same-sex couples from marrying, Davis,
along with a handful of anti-gay florists and bakers, strives instead
to just make getting the license an embarrassing hassle. It’s childish
sore loser behavior, the equivalent of a baseball player pouting in the
dugout and refusing to shake hands with his opponent because he didn’t
win the game.
Because of this, liberals can be forgiven for laughing and moving on,
not particularly worried about Davis, whose temper tantrum isn’t even
preventing the licenses from being issued any longer, as the judge
authorized her deputies to hand them out.
Unfortunately, though, Davis’s behavior isn’t just a bratty tantrum.
This whole incident is also a sign of a troubling development in the
religio-wingnuts: As their cultural power declines in the face of growing
diversity and liberalism, religio-wingnuts are embracing scary
levels of radicalism. They don’t have the numbers anymore, so they are
turning to scarier and more radical demands to seize power in any way
that they can.
No doubt Davis is a comical figure whose self-righteousness is only
equaled by her ignorance both of the text of the bible she clings to and
what it means to have a job as a government employee. But she’s being
used by her legal team and other religio-wingnut leaders to spread the
idea that religio-wingnuts are entitled to ignore — or even
overthrow — democracy and seize power just because they feel like it.
Some supporters, like Ryan Anderson of the New York Times, are claiming
that Davis wants an “accommodation” for her religious delusions. This is,
to put it bluntly, a lie. Davis was offered just such an accommodation
and told that she doesn’t have to personally issue the licenses so long
as her deputies were allowed to do so. She declined that compromise,
insisting that she be able to actually prevent same-sex couples from
getting licenses in her county altogether.
What Davis is asking for is not
an accommodation at all, but for the right to declare, by fiat, that
Rowan County, Kentucky, is a mini-theocracy not beholden to the laws of
the land, but by the whims of Kim Davis. Her legal team wants you to see
her as a sweet but faithful woman, but in fact she’s trying to pull a
coup here, claiming that “dog’s authority” — read Kim Davis’s authority —
trumps our entire democratic system.
It’s not just her, either. Rena Lindevaldsen, who works for the Liberty
Counsel that is handling Davis’s case, has taken to boldly arguing that 'christians' have the right to overthrow the democratically elected
government and simply impose their will by fiat. “Whether it’s zoning or
taxes or marriage or abortion, in those issues, government doesn’t have
authority to say that these things are appropriate because they’re
contrary to scripture,” Lindevaldsen recently argued in front of Liberty
'University'. Which is to say that even though the government has
declared abortion legal, if you decide you don’t want your neighbors
getting abortions, you should be able to declare yourself a dog-appointed authority and simply shut it down. If you don’t want to
pay taxes, declare yourself a “sovereign citizen.”
Mike Huckabee has been at the frontlines of pushing the claim that 'christian' religio-wingnuts simply have the right to ignore or overturn
democracy to impose their will, and not just because he’s been running
around Kentucky, trying to get himself on camera as much as possible in
support of Davis’s attempt to ban gay marriage by fiat. He’s also been
using the campaign trail to argue that the president should be able to
simply end rule of law and start ruling like a dictator.
He doesn’t use the word dictator, of course, but make no mistake,
Huckabee has repeatedly and shamelessly promised that if he is elected
president, he will start declaring his beliefs to be the law of the land
without the cooperation of Congress. In a Google hangout, he laid out
the scheme: Declare as president that there are “constitutional rights
of the unborn” and simply ban abortion by fiat. He claimed a similar
authority during the Republican 'debate', a moment that got startlingly
little play even though it was literally a candidate for president
arguing that he would make himself a dictator.
Despite his regular references to the constitution when making these
proclamations, Huckabee’s scheme would mean voiding out the
constitution, as well, and not just because, despite his claims to the
contrary, there is not a single word in it that gives citizenship status
to embryos. It’s also because his scheme would mean ending the balance
of powers, concentrating all the power of the legislature and the courts
into the hands of the president.
And once you believe that your interpretation of what dog wants trumps
rule of law, not just for yourself but for your neighbors, then it
follows very quickly that you are entitled to use force and even
violence to get your way.
Some religio-wingnut leaders are, in fact, making noises that sound very
much like justifying the use of violent force in order to overturn the
social progress brought upon the U.S. from the democratic system. “No
one should want it and no one, myself included, does want it,”
conservative pundit Erick Erickson argued in an op-ed about the Davis
case. “But how much longer until we have another civil war?” You can be
forgiven for being skeptical of his claim not to want this, of course.
On the contrary, it reads very much like a threat: Either give up the
gains made under the democratic system or face violent overthrow by
religious fanatics.
Huckabee plays the same game of fantasizing about violent struggle to
overturn democracy while pretending to abhor violence. In his Google
hangout, he said that he expected that banning abortion by fiat would
likely result in “extraordinary pushback, and goodness, perhaps riots in
the streets.” He’s not wrong that simply dissolving rule of law and
declaring yourself the sole authority would likely result in people
resisting, but he shrugged this off as merely the price of doing
business.
To be clear, all these fantasies of governmental overthrow to stop gay
couples from marrying will likely remain fantasies. The religio-wingnuts are aging and losing numbers quickly. This is why they’re getting
increasingly fanatical in their rhetoric, of course, but it also makes
it hard to imagine they could really get it together to act out their
fantasies of seizing power by force.
Still, this isn’t just talk. The Republicans are still beholden to the
religio-wingnuts in many ways. The fact that so many Republican
candidates were afraid to defend the rule of law and denounce Davis for
her actions is a troubling symptom of this. The 'christian' religio-wingnuts may not
be up to armed revolution, but they are increasingly demanding that
Republicans turn their backs on the basic rules of democracy to cater to
a theocratic minority. That Republicans are listening is a danger to us
all.
