Davis Merritt: If nothing is ever settled, our future is clouded

It’s unfortunate that Kim Davis’ defiance of a federal judge’s order is seen by many, including a couple of would-be presidents, as heroic, a 21st-century Rosa Parks stoically resisting oppression.

But if the Kentucky county clerk is a symbol of anything, she personifies America’s ever-deeper descent into what columnist David Brooks recently called “expressive individualism,” a state where the distinction between core personal beliefs and public actions is blurred and the balance between those beliefs and societal obligations is distorted.

Change is distressing for many people, driving their emotions away from the reasonable center in those two equations, creating dilemmas for them and disruptive challenges for democracy. Thus, Kim Davis, holder of unshakable religious convictions, and Kim Davis, holder of a responsible public office, is unable to reconcile the two and goes to jail because she left a federal district judge no choice.

One effect of her defiance is reinforcement of the dangerous impulse to change the most important and balanced equation of all, the division of power among the branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial – those “activist, unelected judges.”

The impulse is hardly new. In just many of our own lifetimes, we have experienced three major social and legal earthquakes, and are nearing a fourth, and the change issue clouded each of them.

The Great Depression and its partial antidote, the New Deal, redefined the role of people in the economy and the role of government in people’s lives. Supreme Court decisions upholding New Deal legislation did not change the hearts and minds of opponents, but very much changed their actions. The underlying debate on the appropriate role of government not only continues, it intensifies.

The same with the civil rights movement: many hearts and minds unchanged, but actions, and thus lives, substantially altered. Yet the debate never really ends.

And so with the legalization of abortion: great changes in action, little change of hearts and minds.

The case of Davis is just an opening skirmish – and an easy one to resolve – in the debate over gay rights. The Supreme Court ruled that states may not deny marriage licenses and, thus, the legal benefits of marriage to same-sex couples. Davis has an absolute right to all of the religious liberty she wishes, but she does not have an absolute right to be county clerk or disobey court orders. There were any number of ways out of her dilemma, but in an excess of expressive individualism, she and her supporters rejected them.

A much larger and tougher issue looms: the Supreme Court deciding whether to add gender identity to the list of traits covered by civil rights laws. If the court does so, the much-discussed but so-far-hypothetical dilemma of the wedding cake baker, and every other business, must be faced.

Such a decision, once again, would change few hearts and minds, but most assuredly would change actions. And the disruptive debate would continue.

Our society needs some respite from acrimony, some truce in the culture wars. After all, we are almost a century past the Great Depression, six decades from U.S. troops in Little Rock, four decades from Roe v. Wade.

The Supreme Court cannot change hearts and minds, only actions, and curtailing its ability to do that would be national suicide. But if no argument is ever settled, we cannot move on to newer, larger challenges.

This story was originally published September 14, 2015 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: If nothing is ever settled, our future is clouded."