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A court has awarded a Texas justice of the peace more than $640,000 after she was disciplined for declining to officiate same-sex weddings because of her religious beliefs.
"It's a great victory for people of faith. It's important for people of faith to be able to decline to participate in things that they find that are incompatible with their religious faith," Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel for First Liberty Institute, told Fox News Digital Tuesday in an interview.
First Liberty Institute announced Friday that Judge Dianne Hensley will receive $10,000 in damages after a court found that her religious freedom rights were violated under Texas law.
The District Court of Travis County also ordered the State Commission on Judicial Conduct to pay approximately $630,000 in attorneys' fees incurred by Hensley, who was represented by First Liberty Institute and attorney Jonathan F. Mitchell.
"I think one of the great things about how Judge Hensley handled things here is that she not only was exercising a religious faith to say, ‘Hey, look, I can do some marriages, but not others,’ but she was also being a good neighbor. She had a referral system in place for people whose weddings she could not perform," Sasser said.
According to First Liberty, Hensley faced disciplinary action after choosing not to officiate same-sex weddings because of her Christian faith. Sasser said Hensley had established a referral system to ensure couples could still obtain wedding services from another officiant without additional cost or delay.
Sasser said that Hensley first received pushback from the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2018.
"They gave her a warning that if she continued to do any kind of weddings without performing same-sex weddings that they would, you know, take it to the next level and continue the punishment against her, which, you know, there's lots of different actions that they could have taken," Sasser said. "So it started off with the warning, and that's and that's what we were fighting for, fighting for her right to be able to provide a good public service for folks."
Sasser noted that the Texas Supreme Court has amended the rules to allow for religious accommodation, and added that "the state legislature has also undertaken to reform the actual membership and makeup of the commission so that, hopefully, we won't have to kind of know one will ever have to face this kind of a thing again."
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Hensley said, "All I wanted to do was serve our community and maintain my faith commitments. I am thankful the law prevailed after eight long years, and we restored religious liberty to the land."
The State Commission on Judicial Conduct declined to comment to Fox News Digital.
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