Kim Davis seemed to be showing signs of coming to her senses when she was released from jail on Tuesday. After all, the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk is taking the rest of the week off after being held in contempt for defying a federal judge’s order to resume issuing marriage licenses. Davis has claimed that it would be anathema for her to issue licenses to LGBT couples. In the process, she caused substantial injury to all couples in her county, gay or straight,by not issuing ANY marriage licenses at all for two months. Maybe she realized that if she interfered with her deputies when she came back to work on Monday, she’d likely be going right back to jail. I thought that at long last, this farce had definitively ended.
Well, I thought wrong. In August, Davis sued Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear, saying that by not giving her and other county clerks the option to opt out of issuing marriage licenses to LGBT couples, Beshear trampled on her Apostolic Pentecostal beliefs. Beshear asked the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to toss out Davis’ suit–not in the least because Davis’ legal team at Liberty Counsel erroneously argued that the Supreme Court did not require every local official to recognize marriage equality.
Earlier today, Davis filed a motion opposing Beshear’s request to throw out the case. Read it here. It is simply breathtaking. Davis argues that the Sixth Circuit was wrong to delay consideration of her request of an injunction against Beshear until it could consider federal district judge David Bunning’s order that Davis resume issuing marriage licenses. Davis contends that by delaying her request for an injunction, the Sixth Circuit opened the door for “immediate and irreparable injury” to her First Amendment rights by delaying consideration of her injunction request.
Davis argues that by delaying consideration of her motion for at least “six to nine months,” it exposed her to “immediate and substantial harm and consequences” for expressing her “sincerely held religious beliefs” that same-sex marriage is wrong. Therefore, delaying consideration of her motion had the effect of denying it outright. She goes on to say that unless the Sixth Circuit changes course, she will suffer “injury to her conscience and individual liberties” that can never be repaired. Under these circumstances, Davis says, “delayed review is no review at all.”
Riddle me this, Kim. You’re whining about the “injury” to your Apostolic Pentecostal sensibilities that would ensue if you granted a marriage license to an LGBT couple. What about the injury that all couples in your county, regardless of sexual orientation, suffered when they couldn’t get a marriage license? You haven’t given a remotely convincing explanation for why you made straight couples collateral damage in your two-month protest before today, and you don’t give one here. Apparently you and Liberty Counsel are expecting the Sixth Circuit to ignore that 500-pound gorilla in the room.
When she was released, Davis has let it be known that she will stop issuing marriage licenses once she returns to the office, directly defying the conditions of her release. At least one clerk has stated on the record that he will defy any order from Davis to stop issuing marriage licenses. I’d hoped that her decision to take the week off meant she’d come to her senses, given her previous claims that this was “a Heaven or Hell decision.”
With this motion, Davis has all but announced that she is not only willing to go back to jail, but face potential state charges of official misconduct and the prospect of federal civil rights charges–the latter of which would remove her from office upon conviction. But this motion is the clearest evidence yet that Davis is self-absorbed in a way that an elected official cannot be.
