County-city clerks disobeyed the law (at the time) and issued about 4,000 same-sex couples marriage licenses in 2004 in San Francisco. A judge ordered them to stop. The legal dispute led directly to legalizing same-sex marriage in California in 2008.
If you feel there are some important similarities in the way we should treat officials in respect to this and today’s news about Kim Davis, and you haven’t thought about that yet, please try to articulate that.
If you feel there are some important differences between this and today’s news, and you haven’t thought about that yet, please try to articulate that.
You can do this in your head if you want. I ask because I want you to be stronger and I want society to be better and I think that will happen because we asked.
I reached out to my Ethics & Politics professor, Dr. Alex Tuckness, for his thoughts on this case – emphasis mine:
Here are a few distinctions I find helpful on this case:
1) Civil disobedience vs. official disobedience:normally there is a higher bar for official disobedience since one can argue people consent when they take a job to carry out the functions of that job as defined by the law. Also, whereas the former often lands you in jail you always have the option of quitting your job if it asks things contrary to your conscience.
2) Principles for ideal v. non ideal agents: a lot of the confusion comes from people being selective about when they think the actual content of the decision matters. One simple answer says that official disobedience is justifiable only if it is promoting the cause of justice. You can differentiate the SF clerks from Kim Davis by saying who you think was promoting justice and who was undermining it. That is what a lot of people area actually doing. The problem with this approach is that it is incomplete. Certainly one valid question is “did a person choose wisely when it was appropriate to engage in official disobedience?” But it is not the only question. A different question is what principle would we want public officials considering official disobedience to act upon knowing that not all of them have correct ideas about justice, the likely effects of their actions, etc. The problem with “only disobey if it will promote justice” is that as a practical instruction given to fallible people, if that is our principle we have to take our Kim Davises and SF Clerks together. As with civil disobedience there are ways to craft the rules to account for the imperfections. My reading of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail” is that he acknowledges this fact and that part of the justification for submitting peacefully to the legal consequences of disobedience and for breaking the law openly is that it greatly reduces the harms to society from people like white segregationists who were protesting Brown. Similarly then, we might say that whether in SF or Kentucky public officials who break the law in order to call attention to an injustice should expect to face consequences in their jobs for doing so. I do think it is a very interesting case.
