NEW YORK GOV. ANDREW CUOMO  said Tuesday with regard to town clerks who object to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

The law is the law; when you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose. If you can’t enforce the law, then you shouldn’t be in that position.

A reader writes: “Contrast this with their approach to the immigration laws. As if they don’t already ‘pick and choose.”‘

                                   — Comments —

Christopher Michael Collins writes:

Your post left out the distinction between ministerial duty and duties involving some exercise of discretion. The real fun of this new law from the legislature is that a whole swath of the population can’t be ministers, can’t take the clerk-type job because it necessarily involves performing these non-discretionary acts that are cooperations with evil.

Greg Jinkerson writes:

Those employees in New York State who are refusing to comply with the homosexual marriage law are not engaging in a form of civil disobedience, as Governor Cuomo seems to be suggesting. Civil disobedience is the milieu of thugs in the mold of Rap Brown, Move-On protestors, and the thug of thugs Malcom X. On the contrary, those in New York who are refusing to comply with instructions from their employer (that is the government) are engaging in conscientious objection to a practice that is manifestly anti-Biblical. There is all the difference in the world between the moral obligation upon Christians to be good citizens who are obedient to civil authorities (a true and legitimate moral precept), and the claim that the same imperative extends all the way to a view where the state is itself considered to be the voice of God on earth. The New Testament makes it VERY CLEAR that there is a point of submission beyond which Christians need not, and must not, proceed. What is the test? The test is whether the state is commanding you to violate God’s law. This movement to enshrine gay marriage into law in New York State, and then to threaten its employees with arrest if they refuse to help, is a blatant instance of state presumption to speak for God, in defiance of His law. I’m not calling for theocracy, and I don’t interpret the Bible as calling for one either; I’m simply pointing out that Christians are under zero obligation to follow state orders to violate their consciences.

I realize that this is, of course, an instance of one party (the state) telling its contractually obligated employees to do something, rather than an instance of the state telling private citizens to do something. That is an interesting wrinkle to the scenario and the only thing for a Christian to do in the position of the New York clerks would be to resign. But there is a larger cultural point being made as well. From the talk about arresting uncooperative employees, and from other reports about the difficulty with authorities being faced by private wedding businesses elsewhere who have refused to offer their services to homosexual couples, it is clear that the law about gay marriage in New York is not going to be a simple case of granting certain new rights to a group, with no further cultural impact. On the contrary, this is yet another gross instance of state intrusion. This was passed over the heads of the majority of the people of the state of New York, which is the least of our concerns about what is wrong with the law.

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