There was a time when an employer regarded the existence of principle in an employee as a demonstration of worth. In the ‘60s I remember a pacifist friend applying for a job with IBM telling his interviewers that his conscience wouldn’t permit him to work on any military projects. He was employed anyway, on the grounds that IBM likes to hire people with principle. I’m not sure if his resolve was ever put to the test and I doubt that today’s IBM values any principle other than an employee’s desire to help it make a profit.

We live in an age pseudo-tolerance: everyone is tolerated whose ideas do not depart from the dictates of the zeitgeist: thus a New York clerk whose conscience will not permit her to marry a same sex couple has been forced to resign.

From here:

Reacting to the news that the first New York State town clerk has resigned rather than sign her name on a same-sex “marriage” license, Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted Tuesday that “the law is the law.”

“When you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose which laws,” he said, according to the NY Daily News.  “You don’t get to say, ‘I like this law and I’ll enforce this law, or I don’t like this law and I won’t enforce this law’ – you can’t do that.”

“So if you can’t enforce the law, then you shouldn’t be in that position,” he added.

From a purely practical perspective, since the clerk has not mounted a campaign to dissuade other clerks from marrying same sex couples, she is not in any way hampering the enforcement of the law. The law, miserable as it is in this case, is in no danger of floundering for a lack of willing clerks.

Laura Fotusky is a person whose conscience is not aligned to contemporary mores: this is an affront to the gatekeepers of conventional morality and they will not rest content until she and any other dissenters have their thoughts conformed into the narrow confines of fashionable dogma.

We are, after all, a broad minded-society