Some martyr

JAILING Kim Davis for five nights has made her a misleading martyr to a misguided cause. Ms Davis is a clerk in Kentucky who adamantly refused to dispense marriage licences to same-sex couples. Her offence—to break the law in order to preserve her conscience—was even more wrongheaded than her punishment. Though she is now free again, her supporters, including several Republican presidential candidates who ought to know better, see her brief incarceration as the brutal triumph of secular tyranny. They exaggerate both Ms Davis’s nobility and the threat faced by Christian America.After the Supreme Court in effect legalised same-sex marriage throughout the country in June, several local officials—among them Ms Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky—stopped supplying marriage licences to any couples, gay or straight. She was sued; she lost, predictably and repeatedly. When, after a convoluted legal process, she still refused to comply, she was judged to be in contempt of court and locked up. For all the adulation it has garnered, her stance is deeply confused, not least because issuing licences to pairs of men or women who want to get hitched would not imply her moral approval of their unions. It would signify only that the couples had met the legal requirements for marriage. Ms Davis is fully entitled to her horror, but it is irrelevant to her duties.