“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.” (Romans 1:16)
I thought of this verse last week when I saw Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis, on the evening news. Kim Davis, an elected county clerk, was jailed by a federal judge last week for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. The judge held her in contempt for refusing to obey a recent Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage. Ms. Davis, through her lawyers, said after she was jailed, “She would never violate her conscience or betray her God”.
I admire any believer for boldly showing her faith to a world that needs to see it. And I decry those in the media for questioning Ms. Davis’ character because she had three failed marriages.
For example, the headline in an Associated Press article in The San Jose Mercury News read, “Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis: After 3 divorces and ‘major mistakes,’ she makes gay marriage her ‘heaven or hell’ issue”. They clearly did not understand forgiveness as Ms. Davis has recently become a believer (2011), and is simply trying (and struggling) to live out her new faith. Is it any wonder former Arkansas Governor and now Republican Presidential Candidate, Mike Huckabee, condemns such character assassination as just another example of the “Criminalization of Christianity in our country”?
So what does the Bible say about what Ms. Davis did? Did her refusal to issue same-sex marriage licenses line up with Scripture?
She’s right. The Bible does not condone same-sex marriage, either in the New or Old Testaments. Leviticus 20:13 states: “If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.” There are also several verses in the New Testament, not the least of which is Romans 1:26-27 which states, “For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”
So, I don’t argue with Ms. Davis about what Scripture says. However, I do disagree with her right to do what she did. Ecclesiastes 5:4-5 reads, “When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it; for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you have vowed—better not to vow than to vow and not pay.”
Ms. Davis won elected office, placed her hand on the Bible, and took an oath that said in part “I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and be faithful and true to the Commonwealth of Kentucky so long as I continue a citizen thereof, and that I will faithfully execute, to the best of my ability, the office of County Clerk according to law”. So, her only choices were to follow the law or resign. She is not being jailed because of her beliefs (with which I agree), but because she is not abiding by the oath (the vow) she took. Ecclesiastes makes no exception for her.
My point is this: Ms. Davis is both right and wrong. She has every right to believe what she believes and I respect her for asserting it, even in her place of work. But she took an oath to follow the law, too. I trust she will commit some of her jail time to prayer and either resign her office for what she believes is wrong, or “pay what she has vowed”
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