Citing her moral and religious beliefs, a town clerk in upstate New York has stated that she refuses to sign marriage certificates for same sex couples. Barbara MacEwen of Volney, NY, located in rural Oswego County, says that her name will not appear on any of the certificates, according to Politico. The town clerk's signature is required to validate a marriage certificate.
“If there’s any possible way to not do it legally, then yes, I would not want to put my name on any of those certificates or papers,” MacEwen she told Politico. “That’s their life, they can do it, but I don’t feel I should be forced into something that’s against my morals and my God.”
MacEwen, a 75-year-old Republican, said she doesn't believe that same-sex couples will apply for a marriage license in Volney anyway. She further claims that there are no gay couples in her town that she's aware of.
“I don’t know of anybody like that in my town,” she said. “I’m sure that there might be, but I haven’t heard about anybody.”
MacEwen is up for reelection to her fifth four-year term in November.
Earlier this month, Left of the Hudson warned that some municipal clerks in New York might refuse to sign marriage certificates, and that proposed wording in theMarriage Equality Act could help shield clerks from prosecution. And even without such language in the bill, the legality of discriminatory practices is still murky.
Recently, conservative pundit and former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, called on municipal clerks in Iowa (where gay marriage is recognized) to risk losing their jobs by standing with their religious objections. As as a blog called "Manic Squirrel" points out, Huckabee's objections fly in the face of The Bible:
[Huckabee] clearly ignores a foundational teaching by the apostle Paul in Romans 13: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”
The ultraconservative
Heritage Foundation is also pushing for "conscience rights," which they call the "new front line in the culture war." This is a definite sign that Conservatives know that the legislative battles over gay marriage is all but lost. The new conservative tactic is to play the victim by claiming that gay rights are limiting the rights of those that object to them.
MacEwen is not the first municipal clerk to refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. In California, gay marriage was challenged by a county clerk who objected to such unions. The clerk, Chuck Storey, even asked to become the primary defendant in the lawsuit to uphold Proposition 8, a ballot resolution which banned gay marriage in the state.
In fact, the Campaign for Children and their Families, a wholesale anti-gay lobbying group in California, has equated the issuing of gay marriage licenses to mindless compliance during the Holocaust.
Ask your county clerk if they were a Nazi officer during WWII and had been ordered to gas the Jews, would they?
Note: Campaign for Children and their Families has taken down the blog post with this statement from their website, Save California.
This diary is cross posted at Left of the Hudson.