A Higher Law? Not so much.

Mike Huckabee and other professional conservatives who are upset about marriage equality (and the 60% of Americans who support it) are trying to arrogate unto themselves the mantle of civil rights and Martin Luther King.  They are calling for civil disobedience to resist marriage equality (even as they struggle to articulate how my marriage affects them in any way all).

Ed Kilgore nails it:

In claiming to emulate King's prophetic stance, people like Huck and the other signatories of yesterday's Pledge of Solidarity to Defend Marriage are engaging in a huge act of bad faith. They are not pointing to a constitutional anomaly, but are instead arguing for a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution that sneaks in conceptions of divine and natural law that happen to justify their particular policies. They are not appealing to the consciences of the majority, but claiming those are irrelevant. And most of all, it's insanely laughable that they imagine themselves as self-sacrificing heroes like those of the civil rights movement; they struggle constantly to come up with a single way in which same-sex marriage actually affects them.

Beyond the phony civil rights parallels, what's most annoying about the new "religious liberty" line is that it purports to represent a defense of freedom of conscience when it is actually an assertion that the "higher law" should trump the civil law for all of us.....

"Higher law" appeals are perverse coming from someone running for President of the United States. If Huck wants to stand in the courthouse door and defy a Supreme Court decision declaring marriage equality a constitutional right, he should let his freak flag fly and suffer the legal consequences of following his conscience. Using such arguments to troll for the votes of people upset by social change isn't in the spirit of Martin Luther King, but is entirely consistent with the thinking and behavior of the scofflaws on the other side of the firehoses at Selma claiming a God-given inalienable right to discriminate.