SEPTEMBER 2, 2015
I so wanted to avoid talking about this woman, but her determined insistence on defying settled law has made it impossible.
Following the June Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, Kentucky’s Rowan County clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses to any gay couples from that county and instructed her staff to follow her lead. (She has since refused to issue any marriage licenses to couples gay or straight because she says she “doesn’t want to discriminate.”) The ACLU promptly filed suit against her, and in a number of judgments and appeals, judge after judge has ruled that she swore an oath to uphold the law and therefore must issue the licenses. Her final legal appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court ended on Monday when the Court denied her appeal for a stay in the case. Yet on Tuesday morning, she once again denied a license to a same-sex couple, citing that she was doing so “under God’s authority.”
OK, what’s her game here? Is it a sincere adherence to Biblical teaching? If so, she’s got a lot of ‘splaining to do. Davis married her first husband, and then 5 months after divorcing him, she gave birth to twins fathered by the man who would become her third husband. Stay with me here. Then she married her second husband who adopted the twins fathered by future husband #3. She divorced husband #2 and married #3, the biological father of her twins. Then she divorced #3 and married #4, to whom she is presumably still married as of this writing.
Let’s see, where do we start? How about The Bible, in which Christ explicitly forbids divorce and remarriage, which He likens to adultery. Not to mention forbidden extramarital sex. So much for the sanctity of marriage. On the other hand, Christ never utters a word in The Bible about homosexuality. If there is a case to be made for religious freedom, Kim Davis is, at the very least, a flawed messenger.
But perhaps Davis is playing another game. She’s a celebrity now and, if she is jailed for her lawlessness, she’ll be on the fast track to right-wing martyrdom. Which is perhaps what she wants, a theory floated by columnist Dan Savage on Tuesday night’s episode of “The Last Word”:
“I think Kim Davis is waiting to cash in. I predicted from the beginning that she would defy all the court orders, defy the Supreme Court, that she would ultimately be held in contempt of court, lose her job, perhaps go to prison for a short amount of time. And then she will have written for her, ghost written books. She will go on the right wing lecture circuit and she’ll never have to do an honest day’s work ever again in her life.”
If Savage is correct, it would appear that Davis is sitting in the catbird seat, because, as an elected official, she cannot be fired. Clearly she won’t resign, and veteran Kentucky watchers signal that there wouldn’t be enough votes in the Kentucky legislature to impeach her.
On Thursday, Davis has been ordered to appear before Judge David Bunning to argue why she should not be held in contempt of court. In the likely event that she is held in contempt, Bunning faces some difficult choices in sentencing Davis. If she’s sentenced to jail, she becomes a martyr. And if she’s fined, she can follow the lead of aggrieved bakers and pizza makers in starting a GoFundMe donation account, which, given this case’s notoriety, will probably cover her fine and then some.
The real worry is that her defiance (if it is successful) will spread and might sadly indicate that the marriage equality wars might be far from over.
