Civil Disobedience From the Right

“If the law supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot.”

Charles Dickens gave that line to Mr. Bumble in “Oliver Twist.”

And it sums up the judgment of Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis about the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, which said the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry.

Davis refused to provide marriage licenses to gay couples lined up at her clerk’s office and was sent to jail for five days by a federal judge for contempt of court.

Good for her. We need more like her.

Yes, Virginia, there is a double standard.

In the 20th century, if you were breaking the law or violating a court order to protest segregation, Vietnam, or apartheid in South Africa, you got an indulgent press.

But if you were defying a court order to stop blocking integration at the University of Alabama or Little Rock High, or stop protesting too close to the local abortion mill, you got lectures on the “rule of law.”

Some conservatives say that Kim Davis as a public official has to carry out court orders, even those she believes to be immoral, or quit.

Yet the course she took has undeniably advanced her cause in our unending culture war.

For she rallied and inspired many with her witness, defiance and willingness to go to jail. She set an example of nonviolent resistance. She treated same-sex marriage not as some great social leap forward, but as a moral abomination. Many among the silent majority were surely nodding in approval.

She has also exposed the breadth and depth of the division in the country between an older Christian America and new Secular America.

Once, the Supreme Court could rely upon a residual respect for its proceedings, grounded in a belief that ours is a good government whose actions, even if we disagree, are rooted in principle and merit respect.

That reservoir of trust and good will is about gone.

Almost all of the civil and uncivil disobedience of the last half-century, from campus uprisings to urban riots to political protests, came from the left. But as an anti-Christian secularism becomes ascendant, dominant and imperious, rumbles are coming from right.

Indeed, from the raw politics of the Summer of Trump, it seems clear that Middle America has come to believe it has been had, and that the state that rules the nation is hostile to the country they love, and needs to be resisted and defied.

We are headed for interesting times.