Render Unto Caesar ...

Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas has signed a “religious liberty” Executive Order, and other states are considering similar legislation.  The intent is to protect those who, for religious reasons, want to refuse to do their job for same-sex couples.  County clerks, for example, can safely refuse to issue marriage licenses and claim that to do so would make them complicit in a grave sin.  A judge has announced that he will only perform same-sex marriages if the participants acknowledge, in writing, his objection. The owners of a now-famous (or infamous) bakery in Oregon could escape the fines levied against them for refusing to serve a lesbian couple if Oregon were to adopt a similar law.  Nobody, supporters of such laws proclaim, should be forced to violate their conscience.

At the risk of sounding intolerant … bullshit.

Let me clarify.  I’m a big fan of civil disobedience.  I’ve engaged in it myself from time to time (including such trivial acts of defiance as failing to strictly observe speed limits).  My doctorate focused on the ideas best expressed by Henry David Thoreau, and I’m a huge fan of his seminal manifesto On The Duty of Civil Disobedience.  I admire those who take a stand against oppression, even when I disagree with them.

But only if they are willing to accept the consequences of their stand.

Maybe it would be a good idea for those who advocate “religious liberty” laws to read Civil Disobedience.  It was the original manifesto for refusing to honor a law one considered unjust.  Thoreau refused to pay his taxes because they would be used to prosecute an unjust war with Mexico.  The essay was adapted by Mahatma Gandhi to win, through non-violent resistance, independence for India.  It was a primary influence behind Martin Luther King’s campaigns to dismantle racial oppression in this country.  It was cited by conscientious objectors who, for religious and moral reasons, defied military drafts.

BUT … what those who are seeking exemption from participation in same-sex marriage are conveniently overlooking is the price these moral heroes were willing to pay.  Thoreau went to jail.  Gandhi went to jail—many times.  Martin Luther King Jr. went to jail; his own manifesto on civil disobedience was written inside the Birmingham Jail.  Draft resisters went to jail, performed alternative service, or fled to Canada or Sweden.  If one’s moral conscience is meaningful, there is always a price to pay for it.

“I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State,” Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience. “But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.”

Let’s say you run a small business (a bakery, perhaps.)  A potential customer tries to order a wedding cake (for a same-sex wedding.  Or perhaps an interracial wedding.  Or perhaps a second or third wedding after divorce.)  Such a wedding violates your religious principles.  What’s the moral course of action?

Close the business.  There is no other option except serving the customer.  None.

A business, any business, operates under a license (often multiple licenses.)  In return for services from the state such as police protection, public roads and alleys, garbage collection, electricity and a host of other services, the business agrees to serve the public and obey secular laws—all of them.  It is a contract between the owners of the business and all of the rest of us.  If the contract cannot be honored, the license must be surrendered.

As Thoreau says, this is hard.  It requires sacrifice.  It may mean the end of dreams or material prosperity.  That’s what makes it meaningful and not just a cowardly cop-out.

Thoreau wrote: … until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. And he spent two years at Walden Pond trying to see if it were possible.  For him it was, at least for that period.  Do you have his courage?

What about county clerks who refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses or judges who resist performing same-sex weddings?  Must they violate their consciences?

Of course not.  They only need to quit their jobs.  A government job is, like a business license, a contract between the employee and me (and millions of other Americans).  In return for salary and various job protections, the clerk or judge agrees to honor the laws and the Constitution.  If that can’t be done, the job cannot be held. Simple as that.

As I said, I admire those who follow their conscience, even when I think they’re wrong. But I only admire those who are willing to pay the price for it.  In the 17^th Century, the poet John Milton (himself a Puritan) said this:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race ... Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is what is contrary.

I agree.  Follow your conscience, by all means.  Just don’t expect me to exempt you from the consequences.