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| Not on Magistrate Smith's watch, you don't. |
In North Carolina, civil weddings are performed by county magistrates - bottom-rung appointed officers of the court whose other duties include such mundane tasks as hearing misdemeanor cases, presiding in small claims court, administering oaths, setting bail, accepting guilty pleas, and issuing subpoenas. These are undemanding but good-paying jobs (requiring no post-secondary education, and paying as much as $57,000).
When a Federal court decision made same-sex marriage legal in North Carolina last October, eight NC county magistrates resigned their positions rather than face the prospect of violating their religious beliefs by marrying same-sex couples. It should be easy enough for reasonable people across the political spectrum to agree that those resignations were the right thing to do. If you cannot reconcile your personal beliefs with your job duties, you need to find a different job. An orthodox Jew working at an oyster bar, a Sikh in a slaughterhouse, a Quaker in the Marines, a Catholic in a Planned Parenthood clinic - clearly none have a right to expect their employers to accommodate their sincerely held religious objections, and so all need to re-evaluate their career options. It's no different for civil servants, nor should it be.
Rather than allow such an obvious solution to suffice, Republicans are rushing to turn the issue into a social conservative rallying point in the run-up to the 2016 elections in North Carolina (a state where voters' opinions are evenly divided, with 44% approving of same sex marriage and 47% disapproving, with a 3% margin of error).
Phil Berger (R), president pro tem of the state senate and SB2's primary sponsor, casts his argument for the bill in First Amendment terms:
“If we’re not about holding up the rights guaranteed by our constitution in this body, then all the other stuff eventually is not worth very much,” he said. “We’re not saying that the First Amendment outweighs any other right that might exist. We’re saying there should be an accommodation when there is a conflict.”
SB2 would permit a magistrate with a "sincerely held religious objection" to recuse him- or herself from performing weddings by the simple act of so notifying the chief district court judge. No examination of the sincerity of that belief (such as would-be conscientious objectors face under Selective Service rules) would be required. Neither would the recusing magistrate be required to state exactly what it is he objects to: same-sex marriage (which many fundamentalist Christian denominations hold to be a sin), mixed-race marriage (regarding which the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' prophet, Warren Jeffs, proclaimed "If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed"), the re-marriage of a divorcee (which the Catholic Church holds to be a sin), the marriage of a Christian and a Jew (sometimes frowned upon by both religions), marriage between cousins (legal in North Carolina but proscribed by the Catholic church), or what have you. Proponents of the bill argue that it is therefore not discriminatory, as it does not target a specific class of persons. As well, they continue, the law is not discriminatory because recusal would bar the magistrate from performing any marriages for a period of six months...barring him from easily cherry-picking the marriages he will and will not perform. In an further paroxysm of zeal for 'fair play,' SB2 goes even further, permitting the reinstatement of any magistrate who resigned his position following the Federal court decision rendering same-sex marriage legal in North Carolina, with no loss of service time for purposes of determining the magistrate's eligibility to collect a pension.
Judging by news reports, outnumbered opponents of SB2 offered all the right arguments during debate on the bill: READ MORE
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