Kim Davis and her supporters, such as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, don’t seem to know much about the American legal system, and they don’t know much about the real meaning of marriage. They also don’t know much about Christianity. Of course, when Davis says that issuing a marriage license to gay couples violates “my faith,” she might be defining faith in purely personal terms, and so might Huckabee and Santorum. But they all seem to be referring to Christianity. If they actually read the New Testament, however, instead of invoking Christianity as an excuse for discrimination, they would realize that it contains no prohibitions of the sort they claim.
The famous line that everyone knows appears in all three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” The context is that Jesus’ enemies are trying to trap jim into making a statement that would oppose the legal requirement to pay taxes. Jesus asks them to show him the sort of coin that could be used to pay the tax, and the coin they produce naturally has the image of the Emperor (Tiberius) on it. In other words, since the money is issued by Caesar, it can be paid to Caesar. There are various ways to interpret this account, of course, but the most natural interpretation is that a legal requirement, by itself, doesn’t have religious significance.
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