Speaking to a Pennsylvania anti-abortion group in April, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver compared marriage equality foes to anti-Nazi dissidents, Martin Luther King Jr. and various biblical figures, declaring that it was time to decide whether to “obey God” or “obey man” on the issue. Those who think that the Supreme Court’s decision striking down marriage equality bans is “the law of the land,” he said, have been “brainwashed.”
“We are coming to a place, ladies and gentlemen, where we have to make a decision,” said Staver, who represented Kentucky clerk Kim Davis in her war against the Supreme Court’s marriage quality ruling. “Where we have to make a decision like Dietrich Bonhoeffer made a decision, like Martin Niemoller made a decision. We are coming to the position where we are in the same place that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had to make a decision, where the founders of this country had to make a decision that we will either obey God or we will obey man. And when those two directly, inherently, irrevocably collide with one another. We are in a position like Daniel in the lions’ den, like the three Hebrews that would not bow down, like Esther, who put her life on the line and engaged in civil resistance against the most powerful king on the planet. We are coming to that moment in time.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell, he said, was “a lawless opinion.”
“When are we going to stop playing charades and pretend that whatever those five people say, whoever they might be, whatever they say, no matter how devoid of the Constitution it may be, that it becomes the law of the land?” he asked. “It doesn’t! If that’s your belief system, if you have gotten so brainwashed to think that whatever those five people in Washington, D.C., say, we now have to march to it like toy soldiers because if they say so, irrespective of the fact that they have no authority under the Constitution to do it, then you would support Dred Scott, you would support Buck v. Bell, because those decisions came down from the United States Supreme Court as well.”
In the case of Dred Scott, he reminded the audience, “we had to fight a civil war to overturn that nonsense.”
In the same speech, Staver warned that God would judge America because legal abortion means “we are doing the same thing” as ISIS.
