SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – October 20, 2015 (Gephardt Daily) – LDS Apostle Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a top leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is calling for compromise when it comes to issues like gay marriage, saying “secularists and religionists with opposing views should seek balance and accommodation” versus a “cultural war.”
Elder Oaks made the statements Tuesday while addressing hundreds of judges, lawyers and religious leaders at the Sacramento Court/Clergy Conference at Congregation B’nai Israel.
“There should be no belligerence between religion and government,” Elder Oaks said, exhorting attendees to “ignore extreme voices that are heard from contending positions … Believers and religious organizations should recognize this and refrain from labeling governments and laws and officials as if they were inevitable enemies.”
Elder Oaks also said it was incumbent upon public officials to perform their civic duties regardless of their personal religious beliefs.
“A county clerk’s recent invoking of religious reasons to justify refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples violates this principle,” Oaks said – an obvious reference to Kim Davis, the Kentucky civil servant who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples even after it was made legal by the U.S. Supreme Court. Davis spent five days behind bars after being sentenced to jail on contempt charges by a federal judge.
Elder Oaks said that on the “big issues” that divide adversaries, religionists should not seek a veto over all nondiscrimination laws that offend their religion, and the proponents of nondiscrimination should not seek a veto over all assertions of religious freedom.
“Both sides in big controversies like this should seek to understand the other’s position and seek practical accommodations that provide fairness for all and total dominance for neither,” Oaks said.
To see Elder Oaks statements in their entirety click here.
I’m confused. We have been counseled time and again, especially the last couple of years, to “defend our faith”, to “stand up for what we believe”, to “stand alone if necessary”. Seems to me that is just what Kim Davis was doing. In many of mankind’s most divisive issues, some “accommodation” took place until one side pushed too hard, then some one had to push back . . . Kim Davis, and Sweetcakes, Gresham, Oregon, and others.
Will the pendulum swing both ways until it finds the middle if it is just accommodated?
Norton, as Elder Oaks stated, the problem is not that Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to people who cannot logically get married; the problem is that she “invok[ed] religious reasons to justify [said] refusal.” Despite the fact that the majority ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges explicitly states that law can and should be superseded by personal whim, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.
Now, if Kim Davis had refused to issue illegal marriage licenses based on the fact that doing so would violate the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and, by extension, the Constitution of the United States of America—both of which she is sworn to uphold, I suspect there would have been no problem.