Jason and David Benham, two right-wing activists with experience in portraying themselves as Christian martyrs, hailed the latest “victim” of religious persecution, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, in a column for the far-right outlet WorldNetDaily this weekend:
Her jailing last week reveals that we have deep spiritual and political fractures in our foundation as a nation.
…
We have abandoned the God of the Bible, the very God of our founding. Our spiritual foundation has been compromised.
George Washington said, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
When we reject God’s law by removing His influence from every vestige of society, how can we rightly govern ourselves?
The answer is: We can’t, and we’re not.
Of course, Washington never actually said that.
As the Mount Vernon Association points out, this remark that is sometimes attributed to Washington first emerged in 1835, decades after Washington’s death.
(Incidentally, the Benham’s father, Religious Right activist Flip Benham, has led protests at the home of Judge David Bunning to hold him “in contempt of the Court of Almighty God.”)
Nonetheless, the Benham twins went on to claim that gay marriage is still illegal in Kentucky:
The power to define marriage is not delegated to the federal government anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, according to the 10th Amendment, individual states have the right to define marriage. And the way to do this is to amend a state constitution, which dozens of states have already accomplished by votes of the people. This is the beauty of our system. “We the People” get to decide on our laws (democracy).
Kentucky did this very thing in 2004, saying, “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Kentucky. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.”
This is the law in Kentucky.
So, based on our system of government, Kim Davis did what was right by refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses because she was upholding Kentucky law. And the 10th Amendment protects the law that Kentuckians put in place.
So the question is, if Kim Davis is sitting in jail as a lawbreaker today, what law did she break? Did the U.S. Congress pass a gay-marriage law when we weren’t looking? Was a same-sex marriage amendment voted on by the people of Kentucky without notice? The answer to all of these is “No.”
The fact of the matter is that five members of our Supreme Court have gone rogue and become tyrannical, disregarding our constitutional and federal system of government. And we the people believe that their opinion (decision) actually made a new law, legalizing gay marriage.
