Vesely in the Pittsburgh POST GAZETTE on the Disaster of Kim and the Pope

Kim Davis should not have been invited to meet the pope

October 7, 2015 12:00 AM

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The pope, whom I still greatly admire, almost had me back to church, until the Vatican decided to wade into the murky waters of separation of church and state these days. The decision to have the pope meet with Kim Davis, the county clerk denying marriage licenses to gay couples, threw a wet blanket on that prospect. It doesn’t matter if it was a quick meeting as part of a group. It shouldn’t have occurred.
What left me cold was the hypocrisy. Let’s say I am now the county clerk issuing marriage licenses, and I am a staunch Catholic. As a Catholic, I believe in the church’s teaching of the sanctity of marriage and that the church does not recognize divorce. So if I have a Catholic couple who are divorced from their previous marriages in the Catholic Church, and they come to me for a marriage license, I in good conscience should not grant it, based on the fact that in the eyes of the church, they are still in those marriages. To have relations outside of that marriage would be considered adultery, a sin.
My point is that every religion probably has rules that are at odds with secular laws, but you cannot defy laws that grant rights under our Constitution based on your religious conviction. If you feel that strongly about that conviction, then you should feel at ease with the decision to leave a job that violates that.
I admire anyone who has the strong conviction to be a conscientious objector. However, your right to object cannot deny another person’s right that has been granted under the Constitution and is considered the law of the land.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1814, “Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the common law.”

GERRY VESELY
Nottingham