What Happened?
From the Lexington Herald-Leader: Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis leaves jail; judge orders her not to interfere with marriages
U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning issued an order releasing Davis from custody early Tuesday afternoon, five days after he jailed her for refusing to issue marriage licenses.
Bunning took the action after attorneys for same-sex couples who had been refused licenses by Davis reported to the judge that a deputy clerk had issued licenses to three couples involved in the complaint. However, Bunning also instructed Davis not to interfere, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue licenses.
Here’s what happened: The case was filed by three couples who were denied marriage licenses. The couples were male-maie, female-female, and male-female, all were denied licenses because Ms Davis stopped issuing licenses to anyone. After Ms Davis was jailed, all but one of her deputies agreed to issue licenses to everyone. When the three couples reported to the judge that they had received licenses, the judge’s order had been complied with and he released Ms Davis with the warning that if she inferred with licenses she would again be subject to sanctions.
Judge Bunning has just guaranteed that Ms Davis is out of options. He has established his reasonableness to the appellate courts.
4 comments
Davis has options; indeed, two of those options are even ethically respectable: the first is to resign her position and give up meddling altogether; the second is to embark on genuine civil disobedience, recognizing as she does so that she will probably go to jail for quite a long time… AND lose her position.
She is not getting, nor can she expect, much public sympathy for her have-it-both-ways position. Toooo damned bad, I say! But I suppose it’s the price one pays for the approval of (gag) Mike Huckabee…
I’m sure I’d rather F***abee
Than cede my lot to H***abee!
She has let her alligator mouth get her into a situation her canary ass can’t handle. She is a political Pharisee – publicly religious for the purpose of getting elected. She believes in a taxpayer-funded paycheck.
Her argument now is that the licenses aren’t valid because her name isn’t on them, while she was gone her clerks whited out her name and put “Rowan County Clerk’s Office” in its place but still applied the seal of office and entered them into the marriage registry. The judge basically said “Whether the licenses are valid or not is a state issue that I’m not interested in, keep issuing the licenses that way if you have an objection to having your name on them and litigate whether that’s valid or not at the state level.”
Her Liberty Counsel attorney keeps filing responses that allude to state issues that a Federal judge isn’t interested in, and this is yet another one of them. Kentucky law requires that reasonable accommodation be given to a politician’s religious beliefs. Federal law does not. So at this point she has a beef with Kentucky law, which a Federal judge is going to be entirely uninterested in. She needs to be suing the State of Kentucky to say this is a reasonable accommodation (or not) in a Kentucky court, not a Federal court. But then, that wasn’t the point of any of this, the point was to make her a martyr and insure that she gets wingnut welfare and votes. SIGH.
If she interferes with the licenses after she goes back to work, the judge is going to throw her back in jail. She decided to pull this crap when the legislature was out of session so she couldn’t be impeached.
The Federal judge and the sane people in the office worked out a reasonable compromise, if Ms Davis and the state don’t want to go along a lot of taxpayer money is going to be wasted. The Supremes made a decision and it is the law of the land. Kentucky and its county clerks are going to have to adjust to it.
I remember that the Bible was also used by governors George Wallace and Orval Faubus to justify their opposition to segregation, and all it got them was visits from the US Army.