FERGUSON: When God doesn’t want you to do your job

As soon as the Supreme Court ruled that gay people had the legal right to marry in all 50 states a few months ago I figured that it was just a matter of time before some public official took a stand against the decision and became a martyr for the cause of traditional, opposite-sex-only marriage. That devout soul turned out to be Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who was briefly jailed this past week for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Of course the situation spawned a media circus, and you couldn’t turn on the news the last few weeks without seeing Davis’ face and getting bombarded with details of her four days in the slammer. But she’s a free woman now and her assistants are issuing licenses to all couples regardless of gender, so our short attention spans are looking elsewhere for stories to be encouraged and/or outraged about. But let’s not move on too fast. The questions raised by Davis’ case are worth deliberating about a little more.

Should public officials be required to sign off on marriage certificates if they believe these unions are an affront to God? Or should their religious beliefs be respected, forcing gay couples to “shop around” until they can find an official who is more open-minded about their lifestyle?

To answer those questions, I think we need to try and see the repercussions of allowing civic officials to pick and choose who they would allow to marry and who they wouldn’t. If we let officials like Davis refuse to issue marriage licenses because the union would not jibe with their religious beliefs, I would think that we’d have to then allow any civic official who disapproved of any marriage on religious grounds the same right.

So a Catholic clerk might refuse to sign a marriage certificate for a couple who included at least one participant who had been divorced and not had that previous marriage annulled by the church. A Muslim judge might refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for other Muslims who want to marry someone of a different faith. You might even have atheist civic officials who refuse to sign off on marriages for religious couples because they don’t want them having children and indoctrinating them into what they see as a false and destructive world view.

You can’t play favorites -- once you open the door to allow civic officials to ignore the law when it conflicts with their personal religious beliefs then you have to let everyone go their own way. We could apply the same logic to other situations as well. I could even apply it to my own job.

I work for the U.S. Air Force, and when you come right down to it my job involves helping the military to maintain its capability to do violence to our enemies when necessary. Now what if I joined a religious group that believed violence in any form was in contradiction to God’s will? What should I do about my work in that case?

If I followed the example set by Kim Davis, I suppose I would inform my managers that I would no longer do any work that promoted violence in any form, but that I still planned on keeping my job. In fact when you consider that Davis was also preventing her assistant clerks from issuing licenses that she found ungodly, I should probably go even further than that and try and render my co-workers nonviolent as well. Perhaps I would lie down in front of the main entrance to the base and prevent anyone from going to work.

Or I could realize that we live in a religiously diverse nation and that I can’t expect the law to always line up with my personal beliefs and just find another job. But then I wouldn’t get my face on TV and have my picture taken with Mike Huckabee, so what fun would that be?

Bill Ferguson is a resident of Warner Robins. Readers can write him at fergcolumn@hotmail.com.

This story was originally published September 11, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "FERGUSON: When God doesn’t want you to do your job ."