I must confess to harboring a sneaking admiration for Kim Davis.

Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who was jailed for contempt of court after defying a judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, is in the wrong, inarguably: The proper course of action for a government official who has a moral objection to carrying out his public duties isn’t obstruction but resignation.

Jonathan Adler, writing in the Washington Post, reminded us of Antonin Scalia’s argument about the death penalty: If the justice believed that his official participation in the legal machinery of death was immoral, then he could not be a judge while capital punishment remained on the books. Scalia offers this position in contrast to the practice of Justices Blackmun, Brennan, and Marshall, who voted categorically to overturn death sentences in direct contravention of their legal duties. For the four and one half minutes they spent reading Adler’s article, our so-called liberals were at one with the jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia. Would that the moment had lasted.