This is what pisses me off about the Kim Davis shitstorm

[thewayne]

She's the elected county clerk in a Kentucky burg and she's refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples who want to marry. It is the law of the land that they can get married, and she's refusing to do her job. Because Religion. She's not marrying them, she's giving them a license for someone else to marry them. Still, Religion.

I'm taking librarianship classes for the last few years. One of the early things that you learn is that while on the job, librarians have no: political party, religion, or philosophy. Your job is to provide books and information to people. It can get pretty gray at times, but you try to keep your personal beliefs about anything out of your job.

I guess if you're elected that you can ignore any such restrictions.

One thing that I love about Kim is the fact that she's on her fourth marriage, and her twins were fathered by her third husband five months after she divorced the first. But then she found Religion and thus she's morally superior to everyone else.

It would be so nice if Athiests and Agnostics could impose their beliefs on others, because they believe that Freedom Of Religion also means Freedom From Religion, while the most zealous believe that Freedom Of Religion means they get to feel persecuted and are allowed to enforce their views on everyone else.

I think we should find a Jewish food inspector and get them to protest having to go in to BBQ joints.

Comments

[cp.livejournal.com]

Yup, it would be a very different story if this were an atheist clerk refusing to issue building permits for churches.

I saw it put excellently by a commenter on Reddit yesterday:

"Government employees on the clock are not protected by the First Amendment, they are bound by it. The entire purpose of the First Amendment is to protect citizens from the government. When she's acting as an agent of the government, the Constitution protects us from her. She is not a private citizen when officially performing her duties; She is not Kim Davis, she is the Rowan County Clerk. She has no Freedom of Speech/Religion when speaking with the voice of the government because in that act she is the entity that Freedom of Speech/Religion protects us from."

That makes it pretty clear to me. She's not a citizen being asked to violate what she feels are her personal First Amendment rights. As clerk, she is a part of the government tasked with not violating anyone else's personal First Amendment rights. End of story.

[silveradept]

I note that the marriage license is a civil document, not a religious one, and thus any clerk in the civil service should not allow their religious beliefs to interfere with the process of civil government.

Then again, when you believe the civil government is doing things that are morally abhorrent, you're supposed to not be complicit in it.

I'm not sure how to get those two reconciled. In providing information, libraries are able to sidestep most of the issues that come with acting. But we still have to deal with things like communities that refuse to acknowledge the existence of sex to anyone under twenty or unmarried, and other communities that fell we are censoring their views by not having materials about how the President is secretly an Indonesian Muslim and thus not the real President.

Banned Books Week tends to focus on books selected as literature assignments for children, which draws attention from parents and Moral Guardians, which they see as the government attempting to impose values on children that aren't those values of home.

So it's pretty weird.

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

What disgusts me the most are those who are turning her into a martyr. How dare they compare her to Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks?

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

And look, kids, you too can earn $80,000 in the middle of Kentucky for being an.. elected filing clerk (part time, full time, no time, who cares?).

You might also enjoy the SLU thread on the matter. Doesn't matter if you're on SL or not - there are some sharp minds there (and in some cases, local).