Friday, September 04, 2015

"Religious Freedom" Jumps the Shark

It's coming from quite a few places, but since he's aching for some attention and can't seem to get any lately, I'll throw a bone to the Ted Cruz edition:

Today, for the first time ever, the government arrested a Christian woman for living according to her faith.

Um, no, Ted. Today (actually, yesterday now), a court held a government official in contempt for refusing to do her $80k per year government job and for, alternatively, refusing to at least allow her subordinates to do their government jobs.

If Kim Davis wanted to "live according to her faith," she had numerous options.

If issuing particular kinds of government paperwork violated her faith, she could have resigned her well-paid position as clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky.

If issuing particular kinds of government paperwork violated her faith, she could have polled her deputy clerks and assigned those whose religious beliefs weren't violated by issuing that particular kind of government paperwork to do so.

If none of her deputy clerks were able to get past faith issues to issue that particular kind of government paperwork, she could have said "well, I guess we'll have to put an ad in the paper and hire a new deputy clerk who's willing to do that; I'll go see if the budget has room in it for another clerk or if I'm going to have to lay one of you off."

Instead, she sat on her ass, pouted, and announced that "religious freedom" means  that the taxpayers who cover her paychecks must henceforth live according to her faith rather than according to their faith.

And when a judge told her to do her job, or let her deputies do their jobs, or quit her job, she decided she'd rather sit in jail than give up her "faith-based" claim that she should get to run other people's lives.

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