Some, who loudly lament how illegal immigrants damage the rule of law, have found a heroine in Kentucky. A county clerk, whose devotion to her faith is not stronger than her desire to keep her paycheck, chose jail rather than resignation when confronted with having to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution regarding same-sex marriage.

Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker think her religious freedom is being trampled. So does Ted Cruz, who surely knows better. He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and must remember the 1892 case in which a Massachusetts policeman claimed that rules restricting political activity by police violated his constitutional rights. Rejecting this claim, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that the officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

Trump, the tone-setter of today’s GOP, recently chastised Jeb Bush for answering in Spanish a question that was asked in Spanish. Trump said Bush “should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.” Trump presumably deplores the fact that a leading Illinois Republican politician in the late 1850s bought one of the region’s many German-language newspapers, and even briefly took German lessons. Abraham Lincoln did so, says Harold Holzer in “Lincoln and the Power of the Press,” in order to “boost his appeal to the most important voting bloc in his region.” Somehow, Americans of German extraction — the largest group of Americans — seem to have assimilated even though Lincoln set a sinister “example.”