By: Ashley Bowmaster
CNN: Kim Davis. Rowan County Kentucky elected official. Refused to give marriage licenses to homosexuals. Spent five days in jail. Democrat, oddly enough. 49. Elected 53% vote. Was only in office since January. Mother was a clerk for 37 years and Davis worked under her for 27 years. Rowan County , 96% White and more than 1/4 in poverty. She defied the supreme court ruling to allow gay couples to marry. “It is a heaven or hell decision” Davis said. Davis doesn’t want her name and title affixed to a same-sex marriage license “that goes down in the annals of Kentucky history,” said her attorney, Mat Staver. She was held in contempt. She was released on Tuesday Sept 8th. Judge Bunning said in his order Tuesday that he is satisfied the office is issuing marriage licenses to “legally eligible couples,” and ordered that counsel for the five deputy clerks who agreed to issue such licenses to submit a status report every 14 days to ensure that compliance continues. Bunning ordered Davis not to interfere “directly or indirectly” with the efforts of her deputies in those duties, and that “appropriate sanctions will be considered” if she fails to comply with the order. She’s a newly (4.5 years) converted Apostical Christian. She admits to having lived in sin and has been divorced 4 times. “I am not perfect. No one is,” Davis said in a statement. “But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to him and to the word of God.” The governor has no legal authority to remove Davis and cannot use an executive order to relieve her of statutory duties, he said. During Davis’ time in jail, her attorney said the county clerk has no intention of resigning. “She will remain the clerk of Rowan County as long as the people want her,” Staver said.
USNews: She gave birth to twins five months after divorcing her first husband. They were fathered by her third husband but adopted by her second. Davis worked at the clerk’s office at the time of each divorce and has since remarried. Davis has described her desire to strictly adhere to the Bible in stark terms and thus far has shown no sign of bending to court orders on same-sex marriage. She said Tuesday she fears going to hell for violating “a central teaching” of the Bible if she complies with the orders. Staver says “it’s not really relevant, it’s something that happened in her past” and that her conversion to Christianity about four years ago wiped her slate clean. “It’s something that’s not relevant to the issue at hand,” he says. “She was 180 degrees changed.”The Casey County clerk currently is riding a bicycle across Kentucky to raise attention to the issue and wants Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear to call a special session of the state legislature to pass a law allowing local clerks to play no role officiating marriages and make their role mere record keeping But there’s no sign that will happen, and Staver acknowledges it’s impossible for clerks to hold out indefinitely against ruinous fines given for contempt.We are not asking that she go to jail, and nobody wants her to go to jail. We simply want her to do her job and follow the rule of law,” says Heather Weaver, an ACLU attorney working on the case.
CBS: Mike Huckabee offered to spend 8 years in jail in order to see religious freedom maintained. According to attorny, Davis just wants her name and authority removed from marriage licenses. Gov. Steve Behear: “While they are free as individuals to have their own views and have the right to, they don’t have the right to bring those views into their office and deny people under the law of whatever they’re suposed to be doing.”
ABC: Davis says what hurts her the most about this isn’t the names she is being called, but when people say that she is a deplorable christian and that her God doesn’t love her.
Rolling Stone: Lovely words, but also nonsense. Davis is not supporting religious freedom. By using her power as county clerk to force her religious views on gay couples, she is denying them their religious freedom. What she is doing is about as straightforward as religious oppression gets.