The left is not satisfied with Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis’s agreement to allow her office to issue same-sex marriage licenses. Now they are demanding she violate her conscience and put her name on the marriage licenses.
Davis, an evangelical Christian and a Democrat, was jailed for five days when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because it went against her religious beliefs. Davis was released under the condition that she not interfere with her office issuing same-sex marriage licenses.
The current licenses don’t have her name on them; instead saying simply that they are being issued under a federal court order. That was not enough for the American Civil Liberties Union—whose national organization did not speak out against the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—because the licenses supposedly aren’t valid unless they have Davis’s name on them.
“They want her scalp to hang on the wall as a trophy.”
The ACLU, on behalf of two gay couples and two straight couples, is requesting that U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning reissue the licenses under Davis’s name. If Davis won’t allow that to happen, then the ACLU wants Bunning to put her office under receivership and have someone else issue the marriage licenses. Davis would also face fines, and possibly jail in a worst-case scenario.
Davis’s attorney Mat Staver told the Associated Press that Davis made a “good-faith effort” to follow Bunning’s order.
“The ACLU’s motion to again hold Kim Davis in contempt reveals that their interest is not the license but rather a marriage license bearing the name of Kim Davis,” Staver said. “They want her scalp to hang on the wall as a trophy.”
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh maintained in a column for The Washington Post that Davis’s request that the marriage licenses say they aren’t being issued under her authority “doesn’t seem tremendously burdensome” and could satisfy Kentucky’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.