Kim Davis’s willingness to be jailed for acting on her convictions has now provoked Gabriel Arana, the senior media editor of the Huffington Post to anger. The headline of his piece left nothing to the imagination: “Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Is No Rosa Parks. She's The Bus Driver.”
According to Arana, Kim Davis cannot be a modern Rosa Parks because:
At heart, civil disobedience is a way of dramatizing injustice. You break a law and invite the state to exercise force against you….It's ultimately a publicity ploy; the goal is to appeal to fellow citizens’ conscience, creating the political will to change the system. Davis doesn’t fit into this template. As a county clerk, she’s an agent of the state like former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who famously stood in the doors at the University of Alabama to try to stop racial integration from taking place. (Emphasis Added)
So an “agent of the state” can’t engage in civil disobedience? Does this mean that soldiers who refuse orders to commit war crimes are not civilly disobeying?
Arana did not limit his attacks to Kim Davis. He felt the need to give conservative Christians a lesson in Christianity:
As Dan Savage pointed out in a recent television appearance, Jesus Christ strongly condemned divorce, calling it adultery; he never said anything about homosexuality….The religious right lost the culture war because, despite Jesus Christ’s command to show compassion for others, the movement continues to demonstrate a stunning lack of empathy for anyone but fellow theocrats. (Emphasis Added)
How Arana got the idea that Dan Savage is a reliable source on Christian teaching and practice remains a mystery. It might explain why Arana believes that the “religious right” has a “lack of empathy,” despite the fact that conservative evangelical ministries collectively spent at least $9.2 billion dollars on relief care around the world. Appealing to Savage in a piece about being denied marriage licenses by a clerk is equally absurd, considering he is on record of deriding monogamy as “ridiculous.”
Arana concludes his rant saying that Kim Davis is too out of touch to be relevant.
As a PR ploy, the Kim Davis story is a flop. Only those who already agree with the anti-marriage cause are inclined to see the thrice-divorced public employee as a victim. To the rest of us, she’s a holdout from an era the culture has already moved on from. (Emphasis Added)
You heard it here first. The Kim Davis episode is a flop to be dismissed in the dust of culture’s trail blaze.
It must be true because the man who quotes Dan Savage for biblical teachings, dismisses conservative Christians as people without empathy, condemns Davis for her multiple divorces, despite promoting and identifying a group known for its promiscuity, and compares her to racist icons said it was.
