We just heard a great interview with Clela Rorex on the NPR news program The Takeaway. Ms. Rorex was a county clerk in Boulder, Colorado in 1975 when two men approached her for a marriage license. She gave those men, and five other couples, the licenses after consulting with her boss, who said there was no law against doing so, and that it was up to her to decide. You can read a summary of the interview here. It gets the point across, but there were some important omissions we’d like to fill back in.

It’s hard to believe that such important decisions are left to people’s personal discretion: to hear that a government official said granting marriage licenses to gay couples is not illegal, but that the clerk could refuse to do it anyway, is to hear a violation of our basic form of government. Innocent until proven guilty, legal until made illegal—that should be the formula. It’s the logical conclusion of our legal system. But we see it overthrown left and right these days, from individual pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control that violate their personal religious beliefs to Hobby Lobby employees refusing to help gay shoppers find products. Some Americans have prioritized their personal liberties over others’, creating a hierarchy in which one’s own personal beliefs trump the law.

And some Americans have decided to make this kind of prejudice and discrimination the law, thus avoiding any possibility that Americans who aren’t prejudiced might serve people the lawmakers don’t like. “Religious freedom” acts in Georgia, Indiana, and Arkansas are almost sure to be passed in other states before they are defeated by popular outcry.

Clela Rorex represents the kind of American we can all be proud of. Here is what she said in the interview that doesn’t appear on the website (as of this posting) when asked by host John Hockenberry what led her to make her decision to issue the license:

ROREX: This is where it kind of gets confusing for even me because people expect me to say something profound. The very core of me said, I’m not the person to discriminate if two people of the same sex want to get married and that was pretty much my thinking. …And I just made the decision to do it, I didn’t want to legislate any kind of morality, personal or otherwise. I felt that if the law did not prohibit me issuing same-sex marriage licenses, then I truly felt that I should do so.

HOCKENBERRY: Clela, you don’t think that’s profound?

ROREX: Well, I think I learned later that it was profound. …It was very simple for me. [It was] a question of am I going to be the one to take away such a right if this right exists? And I could never have lived with that.

Some Americans seem to make a career of legislating morality today; they often claim the blessing of the Constitution on their actions even as they violate the First Amendment that says the government shall make no establishment of religion in order to grossly expand the definition of “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” to mean that people can use their religion to strip other people of their rights. Taking away rights they don’t like is their bread and butter.

Ms. Rorex addressed this at the end of her interview, when the host rather callously said that the same-sex marriage licenses she issued were a “different spin on the mindless paperwork of a clerk”:

It was mindless paperwork… you just don’t think that someone in an administrative level of government really can be called upon sometimes to make important decisions. When you look at things now, with the Supreme Court soon to hear once again whether marriage equality will be the law of the land, you see administrative officials, county clerks and others, putting up all kinds of roadblocks to try to not issue licenses to same-sex couples. You see administrative officials saying they’re not going to change the gender on a driver’s license or on a birth certificate. It’s very petty to me, it’s petty. Government officials I feel get hamstrung with red tape and they should find a way around it. It’s not like you’re asking for the impossible.

She is generous to give these officials the out of saying they are hampered by red tape. We will follow her lead and go along with this explanation for all the personal decisions about what is legal and what isn’t and encourage everyone to educate any government official they encounter who does not understand the law and their duty to it as clearly as Ms. Rorex. The job and purpose of a government official is to administer the law, not set up roadblocks to it based on their personal beliefs and feelings. If a law is to be contested, and its constitutionality questioned, that must be done in the public forum of the legislature, not an individual’s lunch break. We all have a say in what is legal in this country; let’s all make the decision, as Clela Rorex did, not to take away other people’s rights in the name of our own.