The recent legal action against Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis appears to have generated three reactions from the general public.

One group believes Davis’ decision to refuse issuing marriage licenses to multiple gay couples was an act of divinely-inspired religious martyrdom.

Others, including the Supreme Court, believe this sort of religious privilege to discriminate is not only immoral, but illegal as well.

The final, less impactful group, believes this issue doesn’t matter when looking at the bigger picture.

It’s understandable to believe that one clerk in one county in Kentucky wouldn’t have an impact, but the butterfly effect of this legal decision to not allow discrimination on the basis of religious beliefs will impact the country for years to come.

Davis argues that based on her religious belief her decision to refuse marriage licenses to gay couples in her county is her legal right. Davis’ lawyer, Mat Staver, appealed her arrest saying that his client would be willing to issue licenses if her name and title were absent from the forms.

Furthermore, thousands of supporters, including presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee have come to her defense.

What the supporters don’t seem to realize is that Davis is not sitting in jail because of her religious beliefs. She is being held in contempt of court after refusing to do her job and breaking the law.

Even right-wing heart throb Donald Trump readily admitted that same-sex marriage is the “law of the land.” Yet his opponents in the Republican Party seem to struggle with the idea of legal consequences when it comes to using a public office to support bigoted, theocratic beliefs. Huckabee even made plans to visit Davis in jail prior to her release.

This is a truly disturbing thought. Huckabee is now supporting someone who, after being ordered multiple times by federal court, refused to obey the law and used a public office to discriminate against homosexual couples.

The complete lack of respect from the doctrine of the separation of church and state has no business coming from a presidential hopeful. 

“What we end up having is the first example of the criminalization of Christians for believing in the traditional definition of marriage,” Huckabee said in a public statement last Friday.

Traditional marriage, in this case, being Christian marriage.

Davis’ job was to certify marriages, using the power that was appointed to her by the state, which, by constitutional definition, shall have no laws regarding religion.

Davis then went on to refuse multiple couples, who by the Supreme Court’s ruling have the right to wed, on the basis of her religious prejudice. When confronted, she continued to disobey orders from state and federal courts until she was finally arrested Sept. 3.

Davis claims to be a beholder of family values and the guardian of traditional marriage. This is rarely said in the Christian community of a three-time divorcee. When it comes to gay marriage, other biblical scorns like divorce take a back seat.

Kim Davis has been divorced three times, has had children out of wedlock and is currently remarried to her second husband. Yet she claimed in a written statement that issuing these gay marriage licenses would go in the face of “God’s definition of marriage.”

Not only are supporters of Davis ignoring the law and the actual cause of her arrest, they are also either ignorant or disingenuous about the kinds of “family values” possessed by Kim Davis.

On the relevance of this issue, what we are seeing now is the first step to end religiously-inspired discrimination in public offices. The entire issue of gay marriage shows the environment of religious privilege in the United States.

The fact that the United States spent so long denying people equal rights on the basis of one religion’s belief exposes the cracks in the doctrine of separating church from state. We are now seeing the first legal action against this blending of theocracy and democracy at a state level.

A few things must be said in conclusion. Kim Davis is not being punished for practicing her religious beliefs. Davis can be a homophobic all she wants as long as it is in private and not funded by taxpayers’ dollars.

This is not “Christian persecution” or “gay privilege.” Persecution would be systematic discrimination toward a group of people, much like how Christianity acted toward homosexuals for the majority of its existence.

The Supreme Court has given a group of people who are no different than anyone else equal rights in the face of extreme prejudice. Kim Davis’ immoral attempts to deny same-sex marriages flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision and the separation between church and state.