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The legal team for former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis say they are fighting back following a controversial ruling against Davis, and even suggested the case could end up undoing the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision on gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis in 2015 refused to hand out a marriage license to David Ermold and David Moore after the pair walked into the Rowan County Courthouse alongside journalists and protesters seeking the license. Last week, Davis was ordered to pay $260,104 in attorneys fees to the couple’s lawyers, on top of the $100,000 she was already ordered to pay to the couple directly.
“The plaintiffs in this case are part of a larger agenda that are intent on punishing people of faith who hold the values that marriage is the union of a man and a woman,” Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver told Fox News. The organization is representing David.
“While it appears at this stage that they have been able to succeed, this case now is set up that it could possibly be the undoing of the very case that started this whole matter and that’s Obergefell v. Hodges from 2015 that has no basis in the Constitution,” Staver added.
The legal team will argue in an appeal that Davis “could not bring herself to violate her deeply held Christian beliefs,” and was entitled to a religious accommodation under the First Amendment, Fox noted.
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“Clerks in Kentucky (were) … provided conscience opt-outs for hunting and fishing licenses,” Staver said. “Kim Davis wanted a conscience opt-out for the same-sex marriage licenses.”
At the time, then-Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, doled out an exemption for his attorney general, who said he could not defend the state’s marriage amendment. Davis was not awarded one, however, and spent days in jail.
Currently, clerks in the state are allowed to opt-op from such participation.
Despite the legal team’s outlook, some conservatives do not believe Obergefell v. Hodges will be overturned. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R), for example, said in 2022 that the 2015 decision was “clearly wrong,” but he does not believe the high court has any “appetite” to review the case. He added that it would be “chaotic” to disrupt such unions that occurred in accordance with the law.
“Obergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history,” Cruz said at the time. “Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell, some states were moving to allow gay marriage, and other states were moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that the states were adopting.”
“In [Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision,] what the Supreme Court said is Roe is different because it’s the only one of the cases that involve the taking of a human life and that’s qualitatively different” than Obergefell, Cruz said.