Kim Davis, Gavin Newsom, and the Christian's Obedience to Unlawful Laws

Marriage according to natural law (and scripture) and so by definition is between only a man and a woman.  Same sex marriage isn't marriage.

In 2000, the State of California adopted Proposition 22 which, as an ordinary statute, forbade recognition or licensing of same-sex marriages in the state.  In 2004, then Democrat mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, gained national attention when he directed the San Francisco city–county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, in violation of the law.   Neither Mayor Gavin Newsom or the San Francisco county clerk were jailed for their violations of the law of the State of California.  I wanted them arrested, but no elected official of the state, sworn to execute the law of the state, even attempted to apprehend Newsom or the county clerk.  I live in a lawless state.  What good is an oath, when it isn't kept, and then no one suffers for disobeying it?  Refusing to execute the law encourages lawlessness everywhere, which we also now see widespread and rampant.

As we zoom forward to 2015, Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, won't issue marriage licenses for same-sex marriage.  Newsom issued licenses in violation of the law.  Davis wouldn't issue marriage licenses, but is it the same as what Newsom did?  Is she violating the law like Newsom was?  Newsome was and faced no criminal prosecution for it.

Even if Kim Davis is violating the law, she is suffering for it, because she was arrested and imprisoned, punished by a federal judge for disobeying the court.  Gavin Newsom violated the law of the people of California, who voted on marriage law for the state.  Kim Davis violated the will of the Supreme Court of the United States. Does the Supreme Court of the United States have the authority over a county clerk in the state of Kentucky?  What law has Kim Davis violated?  What is she in jail for?

A court had not overturned California State Proposition 22.  The people of the state had passed a law and in a lawful manner.  Newsom was not jailed.  He took the law of the entire state and nation into his own hands.  By one vote by one justice, one branch of the federal government ruled on the lawfulness of state laws in Kentucky and at least 29 other states.  Kim Davis is jailed without bail. She followed the state law of Kentucky.  She disobeyed a single ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Someone might say that the decision by the Supreme Court is the law of the land.  On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Obergefell v. Hodges that states cannot prohibit the issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples, or to deny recognition of lawfully performed out-of-state marriage licenses to same-sex couples, which apparently invalidated same-sex marriage bans in any U.S. State and certain territories.  Is the Supreme Court the supreme law of the land?  Are citizens of the United States ruled by a panel of nine justices?  Is that the intent of the founding fathers?  Is that constitutional?

What law in Kentucky could Kim Davis follow to give a same sex marriage license?  No Kentucky law instructing in same sex marriage had been written.  Kentucky had never defined marriage as between two members of the same sex.  Not even a federal law had been written that authorized same-sex marriage.  The country possessed a decision by five of nine Supreme Court justices.

Experts on law might call this a constitutional crisis.  When the Dred Scott decision was made by the Supreme Court, Abraham Lincoln said,

If this (Dred Scott) important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent. . . . Mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, and should not be regarded as deciding questions of constitutional power, except where the acquiescence of the people and the States can be considered as well settled.

The Dred Scott was a court ruling.  Up to this point, marriage was determined by the states, a state right.  That's why there isn't any Kentucky state mandate to marry two people of the same sex.   Article One Section One of the U. S. Constitution reads:

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article One Section Eight says,

The Congress shall have power . . . To make all laws

Congress makes law, not the Supreme Court.  Congress writes laws and the Supreme Court makes opinions.  No law was passed in Kentucky legislating clerks to give marriage license to two people of the same sex.  Donald Trump was asked about the case and he said, "The Supreme Court has ruled. It is the law of the land.”  Is the Supreme Court the law of the land?  In 1820 Thomas Jefferson wrote the following to William Charles Jarvis (several statements by Jefferson on judicial tyranny):

You seem … to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions;  a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. 

Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so.  They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.  Their maxim is “boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem,” and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. 

The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.
It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.

Jefferson also penned the following:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

That comes from the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  The jailing of Kim Davis is government tyranny against the natural laws of God, the very God who gave us our rights.  She nor any Christian should sign a same sex marriage license or certificate and follow what Peter and the other apostles said in Acts 5:29:

We ought to obey God rather than men.