WaPo's George Will: Wrong About Kim Davis

I had so much respect for Washington Post conservative columnist George Will.

Like Charles Krauthammer, he piqued  my interest early to the conservative world view, and deepened my appreciation for Founding Father and Constitutional Framer James Madison, the limited government version, and the necessity for constitutional rule in the face of cultural malaise and  political meanderings.

George Will (Scott Ableman)

I have not always agreed with Will, but I fully received his criticism of Ronald Reagan (whom he had openly endorsed in 1980). "Reagan taught us that we could love government and hate it at the same time."

In the last four years, however, Will has taken on positions which strike me and a number of conservatives as offensive, inappropriate, or outdated. For a long time, he acknowledged that he was an agnostic, lacking the intellectual rectitude to call himself an atheist. Now, he avows that he does not believe in any god.

One verse of Scripture leaps to mind: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." (Psalm 14: 1)

Will needs to reread Madison's biography: the little man with more mental might than most planned on a pastorate before a political career. Madison's respect for the Divine helped him to divine the longest lasting Constitution in the world.

Not just in spiritual matters, Will has failed on immigration. He has affirmed granting amnesty to the illegal immigrant youth who crowded our  nation's borders in 2014. He has championed the arguments for pathways to citizenship, routinely citing the figure that there is not enough time, money, or buses to deport every illegal alien in the country.

This argument is duly flawed.

Yet his latest attack against a freedom fighter was too much for me

Earlier this week, Will actually compared Kim Davis, the Kentucky County clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, to the racist Democratic governors of the Old South during the Civil Rights movement.

Really? Yes,

Here are his words:


There’s no question that the president’s selective interpretation of the Constitutional provision that the executive shall see that the laws are faithfully execute his selective approach to that perhaps has encouraged a kind of lawlessness. People saying well, I can do whatever I wish. But surely it is a wholesome rule that executives should obey legitimate court orders. That’s true whether your name is Orval Faubus, the Democratic governor of Arkansas in the 1950s or George Wallace, the democratic governor of Alabama in the ’60s. Kim Davis, the Democratic county clerk in Kentucky, made a choice. unquestionably, her faith is important to her but evidently her paycheck is also because she did not resign her office. We’ve been here before, in 1892, a Massachusetts policeman claimed that his constitutional rights of speech and association had been violated by rules governing and restricting political activity by police. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held against him in an opinion written by a Massachusetts judge named Oliver Wendell Holmes who said the policeman has a Constitutional right to engage in politics, the policeman does not have a Constitutional right to be a policeman. She has that same problem. ”

Kim Davis under custody

Just to remind the readers, George Will once compared homosexual behavior to left-handedness. No joke. I would comment that his remarks are a back-handed insult to left-handed individuals. His argument "evidently, her paycheck is also" is patently offensive. Is there something wrong with a long-time upstanding civil servant refusing to lose her job? Rosa Parks paid to sit on a Birmingham, Alabama bus in 1955. No one would begrudge her today for refusing to give up her front seat (which she paid for) because of unjust discriminatory laws forcing black people to the back of the bus.

Will also once claimed that Christians are not under attack in this country. They are now, and in fact they have been for at least ten years, especially in Massachusetts and other liberal-progressive bastions, including San Francisco, CA.

What has happened to this once reliably conservative columnist? Will has either lived in the Beltway too long, or fears saying something anti-PC, that would put his pundit-class status out to pasture. Unlike Will's wavering, Governor Mike Huckabee, who has governed not just pontificated, took George Stephanopoulos down a notch on the Kim Davis issue:

You’ve got Democrats who ignored the law when it was the law to have traditional marriage. Gavin Newsom in San Francisco as mayor performed same-sex weddings even though it was illegal. Did he ever get put in jail? He most certainly did not. You have Barack Obama and Eric Holder, when he was attorney general. They ignored the rulings of [the Defense of Marriage Act].  Did they ever get put in jail for ignoring the law? They most certainly did not. So when is it that liberals get to choose what laws they support, but a county clerk in Kentucky who, acting on her Christian faith, is criminalized, jailed without bail, because she acted on her conscience and according to the only law that is in front of her?

Where were these arguments when Will was placing Kim Davis alongside segregationist governors in the Old South? The face of the New Tyranny comes from the Secular Left, hell-bent on redefining eternal institutions which the state has no power nor business to regulate let alone transform. The "conservative" WaPo columnist's unsound comparison of Kim Davis to racist governors is unfair and untrue.