Last night, during the undercard Republican debate, Rick Santorum said this:
Sixteen years ago this country was tremendously inspired by a young woman who faced a gunman in Columbine and was challenged about her faith and refused to deny god. We saw her as a hero. Today, someone who refuses to defy a judge’s unconstitutional verdict is ridiculed and criticized, chastised, because she’s standing up and not denying her god and her faith. That is a huge difference in 16 years.
This comparison is extraordinary, I have to say. The “huge difference” to which Santorum appeals is not of time passed, it’s of office held. The woman at Columbine — and there was probably more than one — was a private citizen who was being threatened with death. We regard her as brave because, through no fault of her own, she was being asked to renounce her God or die. She asked nothing of the gunman at all, and he had no right to expect anything of her. In fact, she went to school that day thinking that it would be as any other. We applaud people in such circumstances because they have been badly wronged and because there is nothing they can do about it. Put in an impossible situation — a situation from which she could not escape — the girl in question was asked to choose between betraying her God or being killed. She chose her God.
Clearly, Kim Davis was not in this position. Not even close. Rather, she was a government official who was violating her oath to uphold the law. This matters. Why? Well, because government employment is “at will,” and existence is not. The First Amendment prevents the state from coming after you for your behavior in the private sphere — from which realm, it should be noted, you have no right of exit; it does not give you carte blanche to behave as you will while sworn to uphold the rules. Let’s be extremely clear here: Nobodywas holding a gun to Kim Davis’s head — not a crazed killer, not an invading force, not an enforcer from the government; nobody was forcing her to bake a cake on her own property and in her own business; nobody was going after her private church; nobody had walked into her home and threatened to take her liberty or end her life unless she behaved in a particular way. Rather, she was being asked to accept the rules that governed her employment or to step down and live her life peacefully elsewhere. There is a case to be made for accommodating dissenters such as Davis where possible. But there is no use whatsoever in pretending that her situation was analogous to private citizens who find themselves unable to live out their faith in peace. If conservatives want to confuse the public, divide their movement, and lose the vital battle over conscience rights, conflations such as this one will be the way to go about it.