Kim Davis has gained nation notoriety for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Most people feel she should simply resign her elected position of Rowan Kentucky County clerk. To date, she has not done so and has said it is a Heaven or Hell decision.
Davis also is not allowing any of her employees to issue licenses, despite a Supreme Court ruling which allows same-sex couples to marry. She feels her version of God’s law trumps the Constitution. Apparently she doesn’t feel that a strict code regarding marriage applies to her. Davis has been married 4 times to 3 different men.
Davis has lived her whole life in Rowan County, a rural Appalachian region east of Lexington. Ninety-five percent of the county is white, according to census data, and nearly 30 percent live below the poverty line. Though most of the county’s inhabitants don’t claim religious affiliation, according to the Association of Religious Data Archives, those who do are mostly evangelical Christians.
The Apostolic Church, where Davis is a member, believes in “high moral boundaries,” according to University of Pennsylvania religious historian Anthea Butler. “No drinking or smoking, modest dress; many have prohibitions on cutting their hair.”
“They are literal interpreters of the Bible” and view it as the highest authority, Butler told the University of California Web site Religion Dispatches.
Davis, who dresses in long skirts and wears her waist-length hair down behind her back, is deeply involved in the church, according to legal documents. She attends weekly services and leads a Bible study for women at a local jail.
She wrote in her statement that she “went to church” to fulfill the dying wish of her mother-in-law.
“There I heard a message of grace and forgiveness and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ,” she wrote. “I am not perfect. No one is. But I am forgiven and I love my Lord and must be obedient to Him and to the Word of God. I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage.”
The phrase “I am not perfect,” may be an oblique acknowledgement of a fact seized on by many of Davis’s critics: According to records obtained by The Washington Post, Davis has been married four times to three different men. She has had three divorces over the past 21 years.
I don’t recall Jesus ever addressing the issue of same-sex marriage in any bible I have ever read. Furthermore, the issue is now settled law. If Davis cannot, in good conscience, follow settled law, she needs to resign. She cannot be her own legal system. She falls under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.
She is in defiance and should be jailed, in my opinion. She had every opportunity to resign. She chose not to do so. Her religious beliefs are her own. However, she cannot transfer those beliefs on to other people.
Kim Davis also needs to pluck the tree branch out of her own eye before casting judgement on anyone else.
Jailing her would make her a martyr. She should be prosecuted and fined and removed.
The point she’s missing is that she personally isn’t approving of anything- she’s just witnessing it. The state is recognizing the marriage.
She just wants her 15 minutes of fame.
Since she was elected, I am not sure she could be removed from office. I did think about the martyr bit though.
Most people have to deal with balancing personal (religious based or not) beliefs when out in public. Or don’t go. It is a choice. Not a profitable choice perhaps but a choice nonetheless that most of us struggle to make it work. She’s not an exception.
The nasty side of me wonders -the wish of which mother-in-law?
If she’s a hypocrite, it’s not the cynical, deliberate, knowing kind of hypocrisy. I think she is just a fairly poorly educated, somewhat befuddled lady who is getting very bad advice from people who are using her to make a public spectacle. All she has to do is quit her job and she solves the problem. Most of us would never pursue a career doing things that we felt damned us to hell.
The underlying problem of her position and those who push this nonsense is that she and they are advocating self-exemption from the Rule of Law. If my religion says red lights are the work of the devil, I can run them while everyone else abides by the law. It’s an anarchical principle that bears no relationship to religious rights or freedom of religious exercise. This whole idea of self-exemption seems to have support in quarters one would think would find it very threatening to order and civilized liberty. Oh well, we live in a world of very low standards, and this is just part of it.
And when a Muslim claims that Jihad is the way….the same backers of this clerk will go bonkers. In her position of authority, her claim to be following God’s law has no basis. She is being used and when ‘they’ are done, they will abandon her and she will need to pick up the pieces.
She will also be jobless.
Excellent points made, Pat. We are all over anyone who claims that jihad is the way but some refuse to see that this woman really is no different and is ignoring the rule of law. She and like-minded thinkers (sic) would fit in better in a theocracy such as is found in the middle east. The only problem with that is, I expect she would have never been elected to her county clerk position in the first place.
She is a civil servant, first, and failure to excersize and comply with the law is cause for immediate removal, elected or not. It is an administrative action, that she can then contest in Court. I get the moral application that she is relying on and we certainly want to protect the ability of the military and law enforcement to refuse an illegal, unconstitutional or immoral order, but this does not IMHO rise to that level. I would expect that we would all agree that refusal to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act was the right thing to do even though it was sanctioned by the Supreme Court, but it was not for government officials – even then – to overtly disregard. She needs to take her protest, if its that important to her, private.
It may be just me but, I think she is HOT in a prairie kind of way.
BS, I hope Mrs. BS slaps the crap out of you.
I wonder if she can sit on that hair?
At any rate, she is in jail.
Back to rule of law….I think a lot of people throw out that battle cry who only mean it if they approve of the law.
George Wallace tried to cherry pick his laws. History has not been kind to him.
We had a situation at my office where a person didn’t feel comfortable signing a particular document. Lawyers had reviewed it and blessed it. Another firm was consulted on the legality of the document, but nevertheless the person didn’t feel comfortable signing it. So the document was drafted for the signature of the boss, the Big Cheese. Problem solved.
This is a situation that could have been solved just as easily. If she doesn’t want to issue the marriage licenses to homos, then let someone else do it, and her objections can be made known. BFD. It shouldn’t have had to go this far.
Apparently, EG, under Kentucky law, she, as county clerk, is the only one authorized to issue marriage licenses for that county. Her solution was that no one, same sex or opposite sex, would be issued licenses, thus she could not be said to be discriminating – she was an equal opportunity refusenik.
I’m disappointed the judge put her in jail instead of fining her with an escalation clause. Sure there would have been fundraising and money would have poured in from those who support her. But a tax on bigotry might make a dent in the national debt. Then when her supporters are milked dry, put her in jail.
If she is in jail she can’t do her job. Is there a removal from office procedure for elected officials who can’t come to work? Or is the deputy then authorized to do the job? I’m trying to figure out the end game here.
Simple solution. Kentucky can get out of the marriage business like Alabama.
And impeaching/recalling her.
Either she can do the job or not. If her beliefs prevent her from doing the job, she should resign.
Evidently they’re issuing marriage licenses now. She’s sitting in the slammer, and her co-workers are doing the very thing she refused to do. A lot of good that will do her. She’s nowhere pretty enough to get a gig on Fox News. Maybe she can write a book on the sanctity of marriage. A “how-not-to”
Welcome to Moonhowlings, Dave. Thanks for the laugh. Yea, she really has done herself no favors.
Do you all view the SCOTUS as having direct authority over a county clerk? In my day, we would have anticipated a change in a written rule, regulation or law and then, based on that taken appropriate administrative action. What rule, regulation or law gave her – her – the authority to act? If a law is declared unconstitutional, you certainly stop administerintg that particular law, but no bureaucrate is entitled to move forward without appropriate / revised legal guidance.
Let’s discuss 2 notable decisions…make that 3. Lawrence vs Texas. When it was decided, not one could be prosecuted from that moment on for sodomy. In Griswold, people had instant access to contraception. In Roe, abortion was legal. Yes, the ruling went down to every state in the country.
Yes, SCOTUS is that far-reaching. I tend to think in subsets. That county in Kentucky is a subset of the United States of America. Fortunately and unfortunately, SCOTUS trumps state and local law.
I don’t think in this case, and I cant remember the name of the guy who was the plaintiff, that anything was declared unconstitutional. I think it was an affirmation of all people to marry who they wanted to, regardless of gender. Now to NOT allow people to marry is what is unconstitutional.
Blue, I don’t think how we as individuals feel about gay marriage is the issue. I just don’t think it impacts me one way or the other. I don’t think it impacts Kim Davis either. Issue the license and move on. If she can’t do that, she really just needed to resign. No one was asking her to gay-marry.
I was a career local government official and worked for two separate Virginia jurisdictions over a 42 year career. My job was to administer building codes. In Virginia, those codes are State codes administered by the localities.
I explained to many, many folks over my career that I was not pro-builder, or pro-developer. Neither was I pro-home owner… I was pro-code.
I did not agree with some of the outdated elements of that code, and didn’t fully understand the technicalities of some others, but I applied them evenly. My job was not to defend code sections but to explain that they had been arrived at through a deliberative process and that there was a appeals process for those that felt aggrieved.
Not a lot of disagreement here in this thread, even among people who often have differing viewpoints. The position of Ms Davis and her crowd is one of self-exemption from the Rule of Law. The idea is that if you voice a religiously based disagreement, you can, on your own authority, ignore the law. This is anarchy. Examples abound and some good ones have been mentioned here and on some other Virginia blogs. The one I liked best is the strict Muslim clerk at DMV who decides that he will only grant drivers’ licenses to men, not women.
Was that a real case or a theoretical one? That is a perfect analogy.
Now…if we can get the federal bureaucrats and politicians that refuse to follow the law behind bars…..
Let’s focus on this one case. She is in open defiance. She is pulling a George Wallace. She wants anarchy. Why have any laws at all if officials can cherry pick the ones they like and don’t like.
sorry. The example I gave (in #19) was purely hypothetical, but it is illustrative. I should have been more clear that it was just a hypothetical analogy that I saw somewhere.
All the better. Good one!!!!
Use to think being the PWC Clerk of the Court
was the most rewarding of any local elected position
– an eight year term, 140k a year and great benefits.
You need to have basic office skills and ability to
hire a good staff. Plus you just follow the written rules.
No getting beaten up over taxes, land use,etc.
Keep your nose clean and enjoy. Now not so sure.
Remember Dave Mabie marrying dozens of couples at the CH
on Valentine’s Day and his wife Copper singing?
It would have been an easy job for this current clerk if she hadn’t gone all political. Now she marries no one. What I do not like is the limited list of celebrants for civil weddings. Many deserving people have been omitted and are not allowed to officiate. This clerk needs to go by the rules also.
Now over in Kentucky, that one brought about her own problems. She could either follow the law or resign. No biggie.
BTW, Big Dog, I am glad you are back.