“Does a state violate the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause or Free Speech Clause when it punishes a judge who has discretionary authority to solemnize marriages because she states that her religious beliefs preclude her from performing a same-sex wedding?”

That’s the question that Pinedale Judge Ruth Neely wants the Supreme Court to answer.

Last Friday, she filed a petition with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), asking them to review a March 7, 2017, ruling from the Wyoming Supreme Court. That ruling handed down a public censure and effectively removed her from a Circuit Court magistracy for her answer to a reporter from the Sublette Examiner.

Each year about 10,000 such petitions are filed. Of these, only about 80 cases will be heard. But Neely’s petition already stands out above the crowd, giving her a far better chance than most.

That’s because SCOTUS does not usually take cases merely because a lower court got it wrong. They tend to take cases that fill three requirements. First, the case should be clean and uncomplicated. Second, they must have nationwide and far-reaching implications. Third, they address important and emerging questions of constitutional law. Neely’s case scores on all counts.

Cases as clean-cut as Neely’s rarely come before the Supreme Court. There is only one fact that underlies the whole case, and this is not under dispute, but freely stipulated by both sides: On a Saturday morning in early December 2014, in answer to a direct question, she told a reporter that she was unable to perform same-sex weddings because of her religious convictions.

The whole thing boils down to those words, and those words alone – spoken outside of business hours and outside of the courtroom setting. Neely did not then, nor any time since, take any official action towards a same-sex marriage. She only spoke. If you want to isolate the question of free speech and free expression, it cannot get any more isolated than that. Score one for the local team.

As for emerging constitutional law, Neely’s words came over six months before SCOTUS voided marriage law across the U.S. with the Obergefell v. Hodges opinion, but she anticipated a question that would arise in its aftermath.

Changing marriage law is not like changing the speed limit. Speed limits are a balancing act between individual freedoms and public safety. Marriage law is about the very foundations of human existence. While there is a reasonable compromise between 60 and 70 mph, there is no halfway ground between a sexual understanding of marriage, and an asexual understanding of marriage.

So, the question that Obergefell has raised across that land is this: Can we craft laws that permit the peaceful coexistence of mutually exclusive views? Or must the disfavored view be driven out of public life altogether?

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) rules, which have been adopted by several state ethics committees – including Wyoming’s, have the predictable effect of driving anyone with a sexual understanding of marriage out of government service. Judge Neely’s case is not the only one, but it has raised this question to national attention. It is time to address this question head on.

Neely was forced out of her circuit magistracy both by restrictions on what she could say, and by the Wyoming Supreme Court requiring certain words as a condition of continued service. Should SCOTUS allow this trend to continue, it would set a dangerous precedent for the future of any group with a disfavored view.

Finally, the far-reaching implications of the Neely case are hard to overstate.

The Wyoming Supreme Court, guided by SOGI theory, assumed that every Wyoming judge must, without exception, not only recognize the legality of same-sex marriages, but personally perform them. This, despite there being no written law, anywhere, which requires this.

But the court went farther still. It next asserted that any judge who contradicts this unknown and unwritten law is, by the mere act of speaking, undermining “public confidence in the judiciary.”

If a judge can be censured and removed merely for speaking disagreement with an unwritten law, what would prevent any judge, anywhere, from being punished and removed for speech disagreeing with any actual law or constitutional provision?

Is it constitutional to remove a judge who merely speaks in favor of removing the right to keep and bear arms? Before the federal court vacated our law, should all those judges who publicly favored same-sex marriage contrary to the Wyoming marriage statute (20-1-106) have been removed from the bench? What about judges (either pro-life, or pro-abortion) who speak openly about how poorly Roe v. Wade is written?

These are serious questions. Wyoming’s censure of Neely opens the door to these absurdities and many, many more.

It is high time we step back from the frenzied rush to “punish the wicked.” What we do today will have far-reaching implications for the free speech of all public servants quite apart from today’s obsession with same-sex marriage.

Jonathan Lange is a pastor of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. He can be reached at JLange64@allwest.net.