Over at the Federalist Mollie Hemingway has written about Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk refusing to sign same-sex marriage licenses. Many in the media have noted that Davis has been married four times, which certainly calls into question her understanding of natural marriage.
But as Hemingway notes her in her piece, each of Davis’s divorces happened prior to her conversion to Christianity. This doesn’t take away from the tragedy of the divorces, of course, but it puts her opposition to same-sex marriage into a different context. This is not a hypocritical person who wants companionate marriage for me but not for thee. Rather, it is a person who has in the past failed to live up to her marriage vows but has repented of that failure and, as best we know, has been faithful to her vows since her conversion.
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Jake Meador
Jake Meador is the editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Commonweal, First Things, Books & Culture, National Review, Comment, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. He is a contributing editor with Plough and a contributing writer at the Dispatch. He lives in his hometown of Lincoln, NE with his wife and four children.
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