Over the course of the past few months I gathered articles about the question of “judicial supremacy” — are U.S. Supreme Court decisions “the law of the land,” or are they rulings on cases?

Here is that page of excerpts, quotes, and links: Judicial Supremacy: Not in the U.S. Constitution, Not the Intention of the Founding Fathers.

Republicans and conservatives rarely even attempt to disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution to the uninformed and misinformed. Of course, that is a bit much to ask when too many on our side aren’t even clear on what it says.

For many who have attended most law schools in the country, the chances are greater than not that they came away with the idea that, not only is the U.S. Supreme Court the highest court in the land, but it is also the supreme governing body. Why do so many law school graduates think that? Because that is what law schools teach.

What is sad is that so many conservatives fall for the notion of judicial supremacy. As to why they do, I can only engage in a bit of psychological speculation.

Here are just eight possible reasons why conservatives fall for and then defend the theory of judicial supremacy:

1.) Because they weren’t actually taught the U.S. Constitution — but rather the opinions of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Yes, this is an important distinction if you actually want to understand the U.S. Constitution, and not merely the written opinions about the U.S. Constitution by unelected lawyers.

2.) Because even as they were taught to consider legislative debate and the writings of legislators when it comes to interpreting statutes, they completely ignore the words of the Founding Fathers regarding the design and purpose of the U.S. Supreme Court.

3.) Because they absolutely hate the idea that they were taught wrong. After all, if they were misinformed about this, what else might they have been misinformed about?

4.) Because it flies in the face of the idea that lawyers are an elite class — if those nine lawyers are no longer the oligarchy they were led to believe it is, their sense of elitism is threatened.

5.) Because they can’t conceive of how American government can work if it’s all about checks and balances and divided power — someone has to be in charge, right?

6.) Because they can’t grasp that the power is invested in the People, not in whatever majority happens to sit on the Court at any given time.

7.) Because just like the idea that “any kid can grow up to be president” is lovely, so too is the notion that “any lawyer can some day be appointed to be that fifth and deciding vote on U.S. Supreme Court cases and thus the ruler of the land — superior to the lowly elected U.S. President down Pennsylvania Avenue and those nobodies that populate the U.S. Senate and U.S. House across the street.“One ‘us’ needs to be in charge.”

8.) Because “I went to law school and you didn’t, therefore I know better.”

This last one is actually my favorite of them all, since I enjoyed both a year of “Con Law” in undergrad while studying political science and political philosophy, and one year while in law school. The United States Constitution wasn’t written based upon the opinions of legal minds but rather that of political philosophers, political scientists, and statesmen. Why some think lawyers have special knowledge about the U.S. Constitution is a mystery to me.

Within the past few days I added two articles to that page of links. First, one I’d missed from late June. Second, a new article that posted just three days ago. Here are excerpts from both of them:

The Myth of Judicial Supremacy
By Paul Moreno (June 26, 2015)

Forget Marbury v. Madison. Judicial supremacy is mostly an invention of the Warren Court. The Supreme Court this morning declared that states cannot limit marriage to one man and one woman.

But this is not the last word on the question. Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . ” The idea that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land is a very recent contention.

When the Constitution was written and for a long time thereafter, many doubted that the Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution at all — in other words, they believed that the Court had no power of “judicial review.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 78, made the classic argument that, given a written constitution established by the sovereign people, the Court had no choice but to maintain the supremacy of the people’s Constitution when it was alleged to be in conflict with an ordinary law passed by their representatives.

Today’s legend of judicial supremacy begins with Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803). In fact, Marbury was quite a modest decision, in which Marshall held that Congress could not extend the jurisdiction of the Court beyond what the Constitution had provided. (And it is unlikely that the act in question did so anyway.) The decision was hardly ever cited for the next century.

Marshall never made any claim of judicial supremacy, nor did the country accept any such principle. Presidents Jefferson and Jackson resisted the idea that the Court had a monopoly on constitutional interpretation.

Moreno goes on to explain that “The myth of judicial supremacy began near the end of the 19th century, when conservatives sought to justify unpopular Court decisions — especially the 1895 decision holding the income tax unconstitutional.”

And that “Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court went on to ever bolder exercises of judicial power”:

The first rhetorical expression of judicial supremacy came in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), when a federal district court, following the High Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), had ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. The justices claimed that Marbury v. Madison had “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in its exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this court and the country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” For the first time, the Court now added that “the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land.” Civil rights became such a popular cause that the Court has been living off the moral capital of Brown ever since.

Can you imagine how upset lawyers are when they learn about the short term memory problem of their esteemed professors?

I encourage you to read Moreno’s entire article here.

Here an excerpt from our next new link, where the writer touches on the confusion of many that argue against judicial supremacy:

Why Judicial Supremacy Isn’t Compatible with Constitutional Supremacy
By Ramesh Ponnuru (September 10, 2015)

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

Huckabee’s side of the argument is of course the weaker one in our political culture. Think of how often people say, without realizing they are making a controversial claim, that abortion is “a constitutional right” or that laws against it are “unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has ruled to that effect; our shorthand treats its rulings as either correct by definition or authoritative in such a strong sense that we should describe them as though they were. “The Constitution is what the judges say it is,” as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said before he was on the Court. Even when arguments about judicial supremacy appear to have no practical import, they lie beneath judgments about how we should talk about judicial decisions.

The case against this way of thinking holds that judicial supremacy is incompatible with constitutional supremacy. The courts can get the Constitution wrong; if they could not, there would be no point to justices’ trying to get it right by reasoning about the Constitution. Judicial review, though not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, can be inferred from it: In cases where the courts have to decide whether to apply the Constitution or a statute that conflicts with it, the higher law has to take precedence. The case against judicial supremacy rests on a similar inference: In cases where a judicial interpretation of the Constitution is at odds with the actual document, it is the latter that deserves the allegiance of citizens and officeholders. Kasich is therefore wrong: The Constitution is “the law of the land,” not Roe. (You can look it up in the Constitution’s sixth article.)

Read more: National Review

This article was originally posted at JohnBiver.com

Written by John C. Eastman

Until her release [last week], Kim Davis, the clerk of rural Rowan County, Kentucky, was confined to a jail cell because she refused to issue marriage licenses over her name to same-sex couples. She has been pilloried in the media for “lawlessness” and compared not to Martin Luther King Jr. for her civil disobedience but to Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Michael Keegen of the grossly misnamed People for the American Way called her actions an “abuse of power” and proposed instead that she should “find another line of work” — that is, resign her elected office — if she “can’t in good conscience fulfill [her] duties.”

The double standard on display is palpable. I don’t recall Keegen or any of the other self-righteous, newfound devotees of the rule of law calling for the resignation of Kentucky’s attorney general when he refused to defend his state’s marriage law — or any of the other state attorneys general who did the same, from California’s Jerry Brown to Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane, and several others, including perhaps most notoriously Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, who was caught actively colluding with plaintiffs to ensure judicial invalidation of the Oregon marriage law she disliked.

“But Davis was refusing to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court,” it will be argued. So, too, did all those illustrious attorneys general. All of them refused to do their duty and defend their state’s man-woman marriage laws, even though the binding precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court at that time, a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, was that such laws were constitutionally valid.

Ms. Davis’s position has also been mischaracterized as asserting that because the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is contrary to God’s authority, she cannot be compelled to comply with it and therefore can prevent same-sex couples from getting married in her county. Her position — so described — has been belittled by simpletons across the political spectrum as nothing more than the misguided stance of a crazy evangelical clinging to her Bible. But that is not her legal argument at all (however much merit it might have as a reaction to an illegitimate decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). Her actual argument is much more restrained.

Kentucky has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which expressly prevents the government from imposing a substantial burden on someone’s religious beliefs unless the government’s mandate is narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest. Because this lawsuit is pending in federal court, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which contains the same protection, is also applicable. Ms. Davis’s lawyers have simply argued that these federal and state laws require that her religious objection to issuing same-sex “marriage” licenses over her own name be accommodated.

There is no compelling interest here. Even assuming the validity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision holding that right to same-sex “marriage” is a fundamental right, no one is being denied the right to marry. As a matter of Kentucky law, the couples seeking to compel Ms. Davis herself to issue them a marriage license can obtain a marriage license from any other county in Kentucky. They can also get one from the county executive of Rowan County. And if the governor would simply call the legislature into special session to deal with the problem that has arisen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June, it would likely even be possible for other clerks in Ms. Davis’s office to issue a marriage license without its being issued on Ms. Davis’s authority (the legislature could simply remove the problematic “under [her] authority” language from the statewide uniform form), or for marriage licenses to be obtained via a statewide online system.

But none of those options would accomplish what the same-sex couple and its chorus of advocates are really after, which is not the “marriage” but forcing Ms. Davis and everyone like her to bow to the new, unholy orthodoxy. In other words, this controversy has all the hallmarks of the one that engulfed Thomas More, who silently acquiesced in but would not condone King Henry VIII’s illicit marriage.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, both the federal law and Kentucky’s version of it, required that Ms. Davis’s religious objection be accommodated as a matter of law. The federal court’s refusal to respect those laws is where the real lawlessness lies in this case. And of course, that lawlessness is quite apart from the not insignificant question of whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is itself lawless. Such claims did not originate with Ms. Davis, but with the four U.S. Supreme Court Justices who stridently dissented from Justice Kennedy’s diktat, calling it “illegitima[te],” “indefensible,” “dangerous for the rule of law,” “demeaning to the democratic process,” “a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power,” “pretentious,” “egotistic,” a “judicial Putsch,” “deeply misguided,” a “usurp[ation of] the constitutional right of the people,” a “perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation,” and an “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.”

That latter point is important to put to rest the other charge that has been leveled against Ms. Davis, namely, that she is violating her oath of office by not upholding the law she swore to uphold. The Constitution requires that all officials, both federal and state, take an oath to “support this Constitution,” and the Constitution itself provides that “this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Neither the oath clause nor the supremacy clause requires fealty to an erroneous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that is contrary to the Constitution itself. That is not constitutionalism, or the rule of law, but the rule of judges; a claim that although the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution is whatever the judges say it is, even if what they say is a patently erroneous interpretation of the Constitution.

Reacting to a similar piece of judicial tyranny in the Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln famously said, in his first inaugural address, that although judicial decisions are binding on the specific parties to a case, “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

In short, Ms. Davis was much more faithful to her oath of office, and to the Constitution she vowed to support, than the federal judge who jailed her for contempt, the attorney general of the state who refused to defend Kentucky’s laws, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who usurped the authority of the states and the more than 50 million voters who had recently reaffirmed the natural definition of marriage, in order to impose his own more “enlightened” views on the nation. One can only hope that Ms. Davis’s simple but determined act of civil disobedience will yet ignite the kind of reaction in the American people that is necessary to oppose such lawlessness, or at the very least bring forth a national leader who will take up the argument against judicial supremacy in truly Lincolnian fashion.

This article was originally posted at the National Review Online.

— John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, and former dean, at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He is also the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage.

Written by Pastor John Piper

I don’t know Kim Davis’s heart, so I can’t assess her motives. And I don’t know her theology. It is possible to do right actions for wrong reasons, and so be wrong in doing right. So I will just try to say something about her actions and what appear to be some of her convictions and perhaps touch on some wider implications.

First, I think she is right in rejecting so-called same sex marriage as contrary to God’s design for what marriage is. And she is right in assessing this departure from God’s will as massive, not marginal, and as personally and culturally deadly, not trivial. And therefore it’s not something that you can just go along with as if that were a loving thing to do.

The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10 that the endorsement of same sex practice — which is what the approval of so-called same sex marriage does — endorses the destruction of persons (along with idolatry, greed, theft, drunkenness). Those who impenitently practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Calling such behaviors “legal” in no way removes the capital punishment that will follow in eternity. Therefore this judgment of the Supreme Court is massively evil and deadly for persons. Kim Davis is right if she believes that. It seems she does.

Second, I think she is morally right and probably legally right to refuse to put her name on the marriage license of two men or two women. She is morally right because God has given civil authorities to the world to reward the right and punish the evil. So when those authorities promote evil and punish good, those authorities may rightly be disobeyed for the sake of obeying God. Here are the two key texts.

1 Peter 2:13–14, “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.” So be subject to governors as they are sent to punish evil and do good.

Romans 13:1, 3–4, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God. . . . For [here is the ground] rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. . . . He is God’s servant for your good.”

Now I don’t think Peter and Paul are naïve in writing this way. This is what governments do. They reward the good. They punish the evil. What they mean is that this is what governments ought to do. This is the way it ought to be. For example, when Paul says, “Rulers are not a terror to good conduct” (Romans 13:3), we are liable to scratch our heads and think of a hundred cases where governments have slaughtered people in great wickedness. What in the world, Paul?

Well, Paul says rulers are not a terror to good conduct, like when a dad says to his children, “We tell the truth in this family.” That is the indicative statement ofwhat ought to be. “We treat other with kindness in this family. That is what we do.” He doesn’t mean sin never happens in this family. The kids are not always good. He means this is what we ought to do. And when we don’t act this way, we are acting out of character. It ought not to be. Something should change. So it is with governments. They exist to support the good and resist the bad.

And here is an interesting thing: A few verses later in 1 Peter 2:18, 20, Peter gives an illustration of how slaves are to be subject to masters. So he is carrying this submission theme through for governments and slaves and wives and husbands and children and so on. And then he says, “Servants, be subject to your masters, even to the unjust. . . . For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.” Peter envisions someone under authoritydoing something good that gets him a beating. Authorities don’t ordinarily punish people for being completely compliant.

Now of course, it may be the slave was slandered and then punished for something he did not do. That is possible. But that is not what the text says. It seems to me he has done something good. Maybe he stood up for a fellow Christian slave or maybe he shared the gospel. Or maybe he refused to have sex with the master. When you do good, suffer, and endure, this is a gracious thing with God. So it may well be that this slave or citizen or wife knew he would pay a price. And that was a gracious thing with God to suffer for doing good.

Now I think Kim Davis was right not to sign the marriage licenses and thus to not treat evil as marriage. It is not marriage! If she blesses with her authority and her signature a union which leads to destruction, she endorses and participates in that destruction. Encouraging homosexual behavior is the participation in someone’s destruction. I think she is right not to do that. Now I said she may be also legally right and not just morally right. This thinking is complicated, but here are just a few observations:

Was she legally bound to resign instead of obstructing the licensing process? Now there are two angles on this question — two ways to come at it. One is to observe that perhaps she is not the one breaking the law, but that that Supreme Court broke the law by their ludicrous claim that they found in the Constitution a right to the non-existent illusion called “same sex marriage.” That is absolutely ludicrous that they could find such a thing in the Constitution. They came up with that out of thin air, because they want it to be. There comes a point when people with eyes look at the Supreme Court and say: This strutting court has no clothes on. They may wear a tiny little one-inch-across tyrannical crown on their heads, but they are not robed with the royal power to make the Constitution condone the killing of children nor to condone so-called ‘same sex marriage. It cannot be done. Out of nothing they create mirages.

The other angle that suggests Kim Davis was not only morally right, but, perhaps, legally right, is that she was drawing the line — the hill to die on — not at whether so-called “gay marriage” could be authorized by anyone in Kentucky, but by whether it would have to be authorized by her. The specific issue was whether her name or her official authority as clerk was put on the licenses.

So the legal question is, “Does an employee, even an elected employee, have to comply with every aspect of the job description if it compromises the conscience? Or are there legal — that is the key word here — legal provisions that mandate an employer adjust the employee’s job requirements to avoid a conflict with conscience?” And the answer is yes. Both the federal Civil Rights Act and Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act have such provisions in them. And so the question for the court, if she pursues it this way, is whether the adjustment in her job description can be made without an undue burden on that office — on the employer.

Kim Davis’s case is not unique. People need to really be aware of this issue. Can she keep her job and not do part of her job because of her conscience? All of these are real litigations:

• Can nurses, who have religious objections to participating in abortions, keep their jobs and not participate in abortions, even though the hospital says they must?
• Can Muslim truck drivers not transport alcohol?
• Can a pacifist postal worker not process draft registration forms?
• Can a Jehovah’s Witness employee not be required to raise the flag at the school?
• Can a vegetarian bus driver not be required to hand out hamburger coupons?

Those are all real cases I read about — whether or not legally one can have his job description adjusted without resigning so as to avoid the conflict with conscience.

So for Kim Davis the legal question is, Can she be given an exemption so that she can carry out her clerk’s duties while not giving any of her official authority to the licensing of so-called “same sex marriage”? And the answer is, We will see. I don’t know what is going to happen.

Morally, she is in the right. She is, of course, just one prominent case of what will be hundreds in the months and years to come as Christians and others draw a line of conscience beyond which they will not go. And the upshot for us, all of us, is that we should all be pondering now what that line is in our vocation, in our schooling, in our civil life, in our finances, and in our friendships. Because if we are not fixed and strong in our resolve and we are taken off guard with the threat of loss, we will cave in. Now is the time to be clear and resolved — before they knock on your door.

This article was originally posted at the desiringgod.org website.

Pastor John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books.

Written by Joe Rigney

Written by Phyllis Schlafly

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by the narrowest possible margin that Kentucky’s definition of marriage is unconstitutional, the Court’s decision was qualified by its assurance that religious freedom would not be jeopardized. “The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection,” the Court solemnly intoned on June 26.

In the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky, one brave woman is testing whether Justice Anthony Kennedy really meant it when he wrote those words. But the local federal judge for eastern Kentucky, David Bunning, has wrongly sent Kim Davis to jail for her beliefs, without respecting or accommodating her sincere Christian beliefs.

Local officials are required to support the laws of the United States, but no federal law requires every county official to issue marriage licenses, which are available in many other offices throughout Kentucky. Even Judge Bunning admitted that “plaintiffs have one feasible avenue for obtaining their marriage licenses” by traveling to another county, so the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling was not violated by the clerk’s decision to suspend all licenses while she seeks accommodation under the Kentucky Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Judge David Bunning previously came to national attention when he required the students and staff of the public schools in neighboring Boyd County to attend mandatory diversity training, “a significant portion of which would be devoted to issues of sexual orientation and gender harassment.” Bunning, who also ruled against a law banning partial-birth abortion, was nominated for his lifetime job at the age of only 34, and was confirmed because his father was a Senator, despite having inadequate legal experience and an “unqualified” rating from the American Bar Association.

As an elected public official, Kim Davis should not have been sent to jail by an unelected federal judge who can cite no federal law that she ever violated. Her imprisonment is the result of a judicial supremacy unrestrained by the checks and balances that apply to all other branches of government.

Described by Alexander Hamilton in 1788 as the “least dangerous” branch, federal courts are so out-of-control today that he would barely recognize them. A federal court has imprisoned a county official to force her to change the way she does her job, without any federal statute to justify such an order.

It is not “rule of law” to imprison someone based on judge-made law; it is “rule by judges.” Kim Davis is not committing civil disobedience, because she has not violated any law. She was arrested, humiliated with a mug shot and imprisoned, merely for abiding by state law and the Bible.

As an elected Democratic official, Kim Davis should be defended by her own party leaders, but the Democratic candidate for governor of Kentucky, Jack Conway, declines to defend her. As Attorney General, Conway refused to defend his own state’s constitution when it was challenged in the Supreme Court.

Republicans should look for guidance to the roots of our Party about 160 years ago, when it rose from obscurity by criticizing the judicial activism of the Dred Scott decision. Abraham Lincoln was a political loser until he started hammering the more popular Stephen Douglas about that ruling which extended a pro-slavery view nationwide.

Douglas, himself a skilled attorney and orator, tried to seek a middle ground between the pro-slavery federal court system and a populace that was increasingly fed up with the judicial supremacy. Douglas finally lost his credibility when he could not give coherent answers to questions posed by Lincoln in Freeport, Illinois, about what the full impact of the Dred Scott decision would be.

When one branch of government oversteps its power, the remedy under our Constitution is for the other branches of government to push back or refuse to comply, as multiple presidents and Congresses have done throughout American history. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln repudiated the Dred Scott decision as wrong and declared that it was not binding on the other branches of government or on anyone who was not a party to the case.

The Republican Party platform of 1860 flatly objected to how Democrats were imposing their agenda through use of “the Federal Courts [in matters] of a purely local interest.” By standing up against the abuse of power by federal courts, Republicans quickly became the majority party.

When the Supreme Court ruled that all 50 states must license same-sex unions on the same terms as marriage, the court was implicitly declaring that Christianity and the Bible are wrong. If San Francisco can be a sanctuary city, let’s allow Rowan County, Kentucky to be a “sanctuary county” where the Biblical view of marriage continues to be honored and respected.

This article was originally posted at EagleForum.org

A consensus appears to be developing among otherwise reasonable people that Kim Davis, of Rowan County fame, either needs to start issuing marriage licenses or quit her job.

For those just joining us, a county clerk in Kentucky is refusing to issue marriage licenses against her conscience and is also refusing to resign. Her name, which should be on a bronze plaque on the side of the courthouse, is Kim Davis. A federal judge has ordered her to appear in his courtroom Thursday to explain why Davis should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses.

File this under sentiments which seem extreme at the time, but heroic when the danger is over, and you are reading them inscribed on the base of a polished marble memorial.

But there is a difference between contempt of court and seeing that the courts have become contemptible.

Now while florists and bakers and photographers enjoy a great deal of active support from the broader Christian world, the most people like Davis will get is a sympathetic lack of sympathy. It falls out this way because Christians generally understand the private sector — that’s where they live, after all — but they don’t understand the nature of government. They don’t understand the public sector and the relationship of God’s  Word to it. Their theology develops a distinct limp as soon as they step into the public square, but it is not the kind of limp you might acquire by wrestling with God at Peniel. It is more like what might happen if you dropped the Collected Works of Immanuel Kant on your foot. That results in quite a distinctive limp, one  you see everywhere.

Here is a quick sampling of that sympathetic lack of sympathy:

Carly Fiorina says the clerk needs to comply or move on. Ed Morrissey says the same. Ryan Anderson generally agrees with that, as does Rod Dreher. Note particularly the last comment in Dreher’s piece — that there are hills to die on, but that this is not it.

Update: After Ryan Anderson objected, I went back and reread him. His position is more nuanced than I let on, and so my apologies to him. I still have objections to his solution, but that will require a separate post.

So I want to begin by making an observation about that hill-to-die-on thing, but then move on to discuss the foundational principle that is at stake here. After that, I want to point out what it would look like if more government officials had the same understanding that Kim Davis is currently displaying — despite being opposed by all the intoleristas and also despite being abandoned by numerous Christians who admire her moxie but who don’t understand her moxie.

First, whenever we get to that elusive and ever-receding “hill to die on,” we will discover, upon our arrival there, that it only looked like a hill to die on from a distance. Up close, when the possible dying is also up close, it kind of looks like every other hill. All of a sudden it looks like a hill to stay alive on, covered over with topsoil that looks suspiciously like common ground.

So it turns out that surrendering hills is not the best way to train for defending the most important ones. Retreat is habit-forming.

This brings us to my second goal this morning, which is to highlight the principle. Pick some absurd issue — admittedly a dangerous thing to do in these times that defy the tender ministrations of satire — and that means that to be sufficiently absurd it would have to be an issue like legalized cannibalism. Now let us say that we live in a time, some weeks hence, when cannibalism can be practiced generally on established free market principles (Dahmer v. Illinois, 2023). But if you want to have a BBQ of that nature in a city park, on city property, then you are going to need a permit. Now say that you are Kim Davis’s granddaughter, and your office issues the permits for all activities in all the city parks. Do you issue the permit? Or do you arrange for a compromise? Find somebody in the office not nearly so squeamish as you are? “Hey, Queequeg! Can you handle this one?”

I interrupt this post to anticipate an objection to my choice of illustrations. “Are you saying, Wilson, that same sex marriage can be equated with cannibalism?” Well, no, they are very different sins. That said, they are both very wicked and God hates them both, and county clerks ought not give either one the sanction of law. But I am not trying to equate anything here — I am simply trying to illustrate how a believer’s conscience ought to work if he is employed by a government that tries to sin grievously through the instrumentality of a godly magistrate. This is just how I paint illustrations, with bright yellows and gaudy greens. I do that so that people can see them.

So, follow me closely here. Chesterton once said that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. We have a set up where a line must be drawn at some point. And in the abstract all evangelical Christians would almost certainly agree that when that line was crossed, wherever it is, the revolt of the county clerks would be a good thing. With me?

Let me spell it out further. Back in the thirties, if a county clerk had refused a marriage license to a couple because they attended a church where the pastor baptized people with heads upstream, instead of her preferred way, with heads downstream, we would all agree that said clerk had gotten above himself. And if a county clerk expedited and stamped all the processing papers for trains full of Jews headed to Auschwitz, we would all have no problem with said clerk being prosecuted after the war. And when he was prosecuted, “it was entirely legal” would not be an adequate defense. Got that? Two positions, marked clearly on the map, and there is a line somewhere between them.

Where is that line? Why is that line there? By what standard do we make that determination? Who says? These questions cannot be answered apart from the law of God, and that is why we are having such trouble with them. We want a pagan society to respect our sentimental religiosity, and that is not going to happen any time soon.

The point here is not just private conscience. The right to liberty of conscience is at play with florists, bakers, and so on. But Kim Davis is not just keeping herself from sinning, she is preventing Rowan County from sinning. That is part of her job.

Every Christian elected official should be determining, within the scope of their duties, which lines they will not allow the state to cross. When they come to that line, they should refuse to cross it because “this is against the law of God.” They should do this as part of their official responsibilities. This is part of their job. It is one of the things they swear to do when they take office.

This is nothing less than Calvin’s doctrine of the lesser magistrates (Institutes 4.20.22-32), which I would urge upon all and sundry as relevant reading material. And as Calvin points out, after Daniel — a Babylonian official — disobeyed the king’s impious edict, he denied that he had wronged the king in any way (Dan. 6:22-23).

Now this takes me to my citation of Jefferson above. Some might say that it is a shame that I, a staunch Calvinist, have taken to quoting a Deist on the relationship of righteousness to government. And I say that it is a shame that a 18th century Deist has a better grasp of the relationship of righteousness to government than do two and a half busloads of 21st century Reformed seminary professors. The striking inconsistency might have two possible causes, in other words.

If just ten governors treated Obergefell the same way Kim Davis is treating it, that entire unrighteous and despotic imposition would collapse and fall to the ground. And if they did so, they would not be sinning against the United States. Rather, they would be preventing the United States from sinning.

The end game here is not armed revolution. The end game is simply a refusal to cooperate with their revolution. Make them fire or impeach faithful officials. Once removed, such faithful officials should run for office again with a promise to continue to defy all forms of unrighteous despotism. As one friend of mine put it, “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

Some might ask what the good in that would be. Wouldn’t it just result in no Christians in such positions? Perhaps, but it would be far better to have godless results enforced by the godless than to insist that the godly do it for them. It would be far better to have the “no Christians in power results” when it was actually the case that no Christians were in power. I would rather have non-Christian clerks acting like non-Christian clerks than to have Christian clerks do it for them. I mean, right?

Don’t tell believers to stay engaged so that they can make a difference, and then, when they start making a difference, tell them that this is not a hill to die on. Make the bad guys reveal themselves. Make them crack down on evangelical county clerks, while continuing to wink at sanctuary cities and local defiance of federal pot laws. Why do they apply their “It’s the law! Bow down!” standard so inconsistently? Well, mostly it is because evangelicals are sweet and naive enough to let them get away with it.

So it is ironic that this valiant stand is being taken by a clerk, because those sidling away from her provide a standing example of our real problem — the trahison des clercs.

Article was originally posted at douglaswilson.com

For those who have eyes to see, it’s evident that an age of persecution of the church is upon us in America. Warnings have been long issued and for the most part ignored.  Ignorance, complacency, intellectual sloth, cowardice, and lukewarm faith have conspired to create fertile soil within the church and without for the sodomy-as-identity juggernaut to spread its body and soul-destroying poison.

In the days to come, Christians will face challenges as they seek to submit their lives to Christ. Individual Christians will face persecution and so too will Christian institutions.  Those whose faith is weak may come to embrace heresy, and once the authority of Scripture on marriage, “gender,” and sexuality is rejected, it will be rejected on other issues as well. As we’ve already seen, there will be schism within churches and within denominations.

But God is faithful even when those who claim to love Jesus are not. He has given us his Word and preachers and teachers to light our path in the midst of a darkening cultural. Yes, there are pastors who are preaching truth about sexuality and marriage, and despite what the liberal press reports and perhaps believes, some of these pastors are young.

As an encouragement and source of clarity on homosexuality, “gender,” and marriage, IFI will be posting sermons from some of these pastors. Please listen to them. You will be emboldened and equipped to go and share truth with a suffering and confused culture. Those who love God and love their neighbors as themselves must never affirm homosexuality as good. Learn from these wise men how to truly love those who experience same-sex attraction and how to respond to lies in the culture and false teaching in the church.

The first of our posts is a brief sermon from Dr. Rob Rienow, pastor of Gospel Fellowship Church in Wheaton, Illinois:

By Charles Butts

A pro-life leader believes a letter from Planned Parenthood attacking The Center for Medical Progress proves the abortion giant is guilty of violating federal law.

The 11-page letter from Cecile Richards to members of Congress tries to explain away The Center’s secret videos of dealings between Planned Parenthood and organ procurement organizations to harvest aborted baby body parts.

But Judie Brown of the American Life League (ALL) tells OneNewsNow the letter actually admits the abortion giant is breaking the law, as the Planned Parenthood Federation president admits, among other things, that its affiliates have accepted payments ranging from $45 to $60 “per tissue specimen” from abortions.

“I think the letter was, [Richards] thought, written in such a way that it would defend and protect Planned Parenthood from any kind of assault, because the purpose of the letter was, of course, to attack The Center for Medical Progress,” Brown asserts. “But quite the opposite has occurred when you read the letter with a clear head.”

Brown points out that pro-lifers, including U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), have said all along the videos prove criminal wrongdoing.

“The whole purpose of The Center for Medical Progress’ campaign and all these videos has been focused on getting somebody to indict Planned Parenthood for committing crimes against humanity by the brutal way that they have not only taken the lives of preborn babies, but then made a profit on selling their body parts,” the ALL spokesperson notes.

She feels the public needs to continue pressuring Congress to take action.

“I am so proud of David Daleiden and all the people at The Center for Medical Progress, because they’ve given a face to this horrific practice, and they’ve given it a name — it’s murder,” the pro-lifer concludes.

Originally posted at www.onenewsnow.com

Mauck & Baker is a well-respected Chicago law firm committed to protecting religious liberty through the application of biblical principles. In the service of this commitment, they have issued a statement regarding Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s deeply troubling abandonment of conservative principles through his enactment of a controversial, anti-autonomy law that prohibits mental health professionals from helping minors who seek assistance in resisting unwanted, unchosen same-sex attraction, rejecting a “gay” identity, and/or accepting their physical embodiment:

Rauner Signs Bill Restricting Sexual Orientation Counseling for Minors

(Chicago, Illinois) Late last Friday, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law the deceptively titled “Youth Mental Health Protection Act,” becoming one of only three states to make it illegal to counsel minors on how to cope with or overcome unwanted same-sex attraction. The Act further provides that “no person or entity may, in the conduct of any trade or comer… represent homosexuality as a mental disease, disorder, or illness.”

The law is written broadly enough to put at risk not only licensed counselors but also pastors and others  who are in “commerce” (compensated for counseling) and refer to homosexuality as an illness or “disorder” (i.e. sin) to any counselee, minor or adult, with the purpose of helping the counselee be free from same-sex attractions. Those who continue to provide such counseling and care will face disciplinary actions by the state and are subject to suit under the Illinois Consumer Fraud Act.

Attorney John Mauck, partner at the law firm Mauck & Baker responded, “According to Scripture, it is possible for all of us who have sinful tendencies and compulsions to change and become holy in God’s sight. The Apostle Paul indicates this is also true for those involved in homosexual conduct. In 1 Corinthians 6:11, speaking of ‘homosexual offenders’ and others, Paul writes, ‘such were some of you.’”

Licensed counselors, minors who struggle with same-sex attraction, or pastors, are encouraged to contact Mauck & Baker to discuss their civil rights and join with others interested in challenging the law. Also, the full length documentary, “Such Were Some of You” from Pure Passion Media is a valuable resource for testimonies of ex-gays and how Jesus helped them leave the gay lifestyle. To purchase the DVD for $15, call (312) 726-1243 or email info@mauckbaker.com.

Former Arkansas Governor and current 2016 Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee has some strong encouragement in keeping social conservatives active in the upcoming elections. Governor Huckabee spoke at the Freedom’s Journal Institute’s recent RISE Initiative conference.

Illinois Family Institute
Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet

Friday, September 18 , 2015
The Stonegate Banquet & Conference Center (Map)
Click HERE for a banquet flyer.

Secure your tickets now – click here or call (708) 781-9328.

Program advertisements & banquet sponsorships available.

Former Arkansas Governor and current 2016 Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee has some strong encouragement in keeping social conservatives active in the upcoming elections. Governor Huckabee spoke at the Freedom’s Journal Institute’s recent RISE Initiative conference.

In the wake of yet another video linking Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, to the sale of organs from aborted babies, lawmakers in the U.S. Senate are planning to vote to defund the inhumane organization that profits from carefully dismembering preborn babies and harvesting their organs and other tissues.

We now have a chance to do something about it.

On Monday, the U.S. Senate may vote to prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving taxpayer funds. According to their 2013-2014 annual report, Planned Parenthood received more than $500 million of taxpayer money.

U.S. Senators Joni Ernst (R-IA), Rand Paul (R-KY), and James Lankford (R-OK) are the lead sponsors of Senate Bill 1881 (S.1881), which currently has 21 cosponsors. S. 1881 bill was announced during a July 29th press conference.

This legislation would do the following:

• Prohibit federal funding of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and any of its affiliate organizations.
• Protect federal funding for health services for women, including diagnostic laboratory and radiology services, well-child care, prenatal and postnatal care, immunizations, cervical and breast cancer screenings, and more.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send an email or fax to our U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk, urging them  to defund Planned Parenthood. They both need to hear from you — their Illinois constituents — that Planned Parenthood shouldn’t receive a dime of taxpayer money.

More ACTION:  Please pray that our state and nation will repent from supporting this moral, political, and financial evil. Pray that your “pro-choice” family members, friends, and neighbors will finally understand that abortion is barbaric and indefensible in every situation — not just when tax dollars are being spent to support it. Pray that our state and nation will mourn the legalization of abortion, which has eradicated 60+ million innocent lives.

Spread the word! Tell your friends to contact their U.S. Senators by forwarding this email or by posting it on Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #DefundPP.

The undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood has given us a rare opportunity of which we must take advantage. Now that Americans have been exposed to Planned Parenthood’s pernicious practices, it is our chance to cut off their federal funding, thereby saving lives.

Download a Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet or a Church Bulletin Insert.

National Day of Protest against Planned Parenthood
Saturday, August 22, 9:00 to 11:00 A.M.
Planned Parenthood, 3051 E New York St, Aurora (map)
Lead by the Pro-Life Action League

By Peter Sullivan

Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) on Wednesday indicated he’ll oppose a bill backed by Republican leadership to defund Planned Parenthood.

Kirk is up for reelection next year and is a top Democratic target.

“In other states tissue donation programs should be investigated but in Illinois there is no similar program,” Kirk said in a statement to The Hill. “I do not plan to cut access to basic health care and contraception for women, the majority of whom have no other resources.”

Kirk is the second Republican senator to indicate opposition to the bill.

“I’m still looking at the bill, but if it is an immediate defunding of Planned Parenthood before we have more facts in, then I would likely oppose the amendment,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told reporters Wednesday.

Many Senate Republicans, though, have been touting the bill and pressuring Democrats to support it.

Three controversial undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood officials candidly discussing the price of fetal tissue for medical research have sparked outrage.

Backers are pointing out that the money would be redistributed to other organizations, so there would be no overall cut in funding for women’s health services.

“We introduced legislation last night that would ensure taxpayer dollars for women’s health are spent on women’s health, not a scandal-plagued political lobbying giant,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday.

“It’s a simple choice,” he added. “Senators can either vote to protect women’s health, or they can vote to protect subsidies for a political group mired in scandal.”

This article was originally found on thehill.com

Written by Dr. Frank Newport

The two major decisions recently handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court have very direct relationships to public opinion. One of the decisions fits well with majority public opinion. The other, in a broad sense, does not. The first corresponds to public opinion that has shifted significantly over the past several years, while the second relates to public opinion that has been more fixed. One of these is an issue that has very much been tethered to or anchored by Americans’ underlying religious beliefs; the other is a purely secular issue unrelated to the usual concerns based on religion. But it is the religiously tethered attitude that has seen the biggest change and that ends up more in line with the U.S. Supreme Court decision, while the secular attitude has remained unchanged and is more out of sync with the court’s ruling.

The first of these two major SCOTUS decisions, of course, is the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that in essence legalized same-sex marriage across the country. The second — albeit basically a ruling on a technicality — is the King v. Burwell decision that validated the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.

Obergefell falls in line with majority public opinion in the U.S. Americans’ attitudes toward legalizing same-sex marriage have shifted dramatically in recent years, as has been well-documented, with six in 10 in our latest Gallup reading (before the decision) in favor.

This dramatic change in attitudes has occurred despite the fact that the issue of same-sex marriage is one of a cluster of family and reproduction issues that traditionally are strongly connected to religious doctrine, and highly correlated with an individual’s religiosity. Given that religious beliefs are tethered to fundamental beliefs in a Supreme Being and in overall worldviews, one would thus hypothesize that religiously connected attitudes have a very fundamental anchor that would be resistant to change.

But that hasn’t been the case. In fact, attitudes concerning a list of moral behaviors and values traditionally linked to religious doctrines — including same-sex marriage — have shifted quite substantially in recent years, all toward acceptance of what may previously have been more negatively sanctioned behaviors. There are still marked religious differences in tolerance for these types of behaviors, but the shifts have occurred among segments that are both highly religious and not so religious. In short, attitudes connected to the type of family and reproduction issues most highly related to most religions’ normative structures have been the most labile.

We’ve seen relatively little change in terms of attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act, albeit over its fairly short existence and the brief period in which we have measured it. Less than half of Americans said that they approved of the Affordable Care Act in our latest measure, before the SCOTUS decision (we are updating this measure now). And there has been no rapid or significant change in those attitudes in recent years as the provisions of the healthcare law have become operational.

These attitudes about Obamacare are thus the ones that appear to be connected to an underlying anchor or foundation, certainly more so than is the case with same-sex marriage. (While attitudes about the Affordable Care Act are correlated with religiosity, I think that’s more of an artifact of the relationship between religion and politics than it is a representation of religiously driven attitudes.)

If it’s not religion, what is that anchor? One answer to that question is Americans’ fundamental attitudes toward government. It’s quite likely that the healthcare law has become symbolic of the role of government in people’s lives, and that in turn appears to be a very strong and apparently stable base issue in Americans’ minds.

Check out this trend on a core Gallup question asking Americans about their views of the role of government in Americans’ lives:

This trend graph does not show the same type of progressive change seen in moral attitudes since the mid-1990s. The one strong shift in the period immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks quickly dissipated, as attitudes fell back into the accustomed pattern shortly thereafter. If Obamacare is bound up with these fundamental underlying attitudes that are relatively stable and fixed, even though secular in nature, that could help explain why views toward Obamacare are not moving a lot. Government and its role in society, in other words, may be the type of bedrock or fundamental underlying attitude we traditionally associate with religion, while moral issues appear much more likely to be built on “shifting sand.”

There has been a good deal of discussion as to how the presidential candidates — particularly Republican candidates — will handle a changing environment in which their positions on moral issues and values are less mainstream than they were even just a few years ago. Many of the candidates will no doubt back off from a heavy focus on these issues, taking account of public opinion, unless they assume that the quickness with which attitudes changed in one direction means they could change back in the other just as fast — an unlikely possibility.

But a campaign focus on the Affordable Care Act is another matter. Unlike same-sex marriage, the healthcare law does not enjoy majority public opinion (unless that changes in new, post-decision measures). And the lack of a major shift in attitudes toward Obamacare or toward the underlying issue of the role of government in Americans’ lives suggests that these attitudes are strongly held.

Some commentators have assumed that expansion of the role of government is the simple and logical next step in the evolution of American society. Others still view government expansion as a strong evil. But if conservatives have the equivalent of a religious underpinning to their opposition to big government — and if liberals have just as strong an underpinning to their support for big government — then the debate has the potential to become a powerfully important fulcrum on which the election could turn.

If candidates on the left are going to focus on their conviction that the role of government needs to be expanded — say, in terms of intervening in the economic system to reduce inequality or create jobs by increased focus on infrastructure — they are going to have to try to understand why this provokes such a strong reaction from those who are more in the center or on the right. Similarly, if Republican candidates are going to focus on a call for reducing the role of government in Americans’ lives, they are going to have to try to understand why this is so strongly unacceptable to those more in the center or on the left.

I’ve pointed out before how these attitudes about government are two-pronged, involving both philosophic and practical concerns. Candidates are going to have to deal with both. The role of government — along with the usual suspects of the economy and international relations — could be the major playing field on which the coming election is played out. Moral issues and values may be less so.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well.

This article was originally posted at the Gallup.com website.

This week, U.S. Representatives Peter Roskam (R-West Chicago), Randy Hultgren (R-Campton Hills), Daniel Lipinski (D-Chicago),  Mike Bost (R-Belleville), Rodney Davis (R-Decatur),  and John Shimkus (R-Effingham),  joined dozens of their colleagues in the U.S. Congress in calling for an investigation into the shocking revelations that a top Planned Parenthood executive was caught on video discussing dismembering babies and selling their body parts.

(Read more:  Click HERE to read Laurie Higgin’s article.)

This recently released video exposes Dr. Deborah Nucatola, a Planned Parenthood executive, negotiating with tissue brokers to determine what organs they would like to “procure” and offering ways to alter abortion procedures to make sure they would be able to safely secure the necessary body parts, in tact and undamaged.  She explains how she carefully places her graspers such that she can crush the baby’s body without damaging the organs that the broker is seeking. At one point Nucatola even describes how they could alter the abortion in such a way, that it sounds very much like she is describing the illegal partial birth abortion procedure.

The content of the Congressional letter demanding an investigation is pasted here below:

Dear Chairman Upton and Chairman Goodlatte,

Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the nation doing over 300,000 abortions per year.  That is roughly a quarter of all abortions in America and means that on average Planned Parenthood carries out one abortion every 2 minutes. 

While this fact is outrageous enough, we are deeply disturbed by new allegations that Planned Parenthood abortion clinics not only profit from the intentional destruction of unborn children, but also sell children’s organs piece by piece to fetal tissue brokers.  These actions are unconscionable and these horrific abuses must be stopped.

In a recently released video a top Planned Parenthood executive describes huddling with tissue brokers early in the day to determine what organs they would like to “procure” and altering procedures to make sure she is able to obtain the necessary body parts.  She explains how she carefully places her graspers such that she can crush the baby’s body without damaging the organs that the broker is seeking. At one point she even describes abortion providers altering the abortion such that she could be describing the illegal partial birth abortion procedure.  

Also in the video, the executive discusses payments of $30-$100 for fetal body parts. She further indicates that they want to avoid being perceived as selling tissue, so they want to come up with a rate that “looks like it is a reasonable number for the effort that is allotted on their part.”

These revelations give good reason for Congress to take a serious look at the practices of Planned Parenthood and the companies that buy and sell the body parts and organs of unborn children who are dismembered in Planned Parenthood clinics. 

We greatly appreciate your announcement that you will be launching an investigation and urge you to act swiftly to examine current federal laws and regulations in your Committees’ jurisdiction, potential violations of current law, and identify areas where the law may be insufficient. In addition we urge you to explore the activities of abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood, companies that broker fetal tissue and any incentives created by National Institutes of Health funding for research using the body parts of unborn children.

Please support IFI as we fight for liberty & work to advance the truth
about the sanctity of life & importance of marriage in our culture!