Clerk's office defies federal judge's order to issue same-sex marriage licenses
Setting the stage for a showdown, a county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, has apparently defied a federal judge’s Wednesday order to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite her personal religious objections.
Clerk Kim Davis filed an appeal and plans to seek a stay of the trial court’s ruling while the appeal is pending, her lawyer, Roger Gannam, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Meanwhile, Davis did not go to work Thursday. When two men sought a marriage license, a deputy clerk said the office isn’t issuing them but the men could go to another county to get one, reports the New York Times (reg. req.). Davis has stopped issuing marriage licenses to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples while the litigation is pending, the article explains.
“Kim Davis is resolute in vindicating her rights,” Gannam, a senior litigation attorney at the Liberty Counsel religious advocacy group, told the Lexington newspaper. “Fundamentally, we disagree with this order because the government should never be able to compel a person to violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
The two men denied a marriage license had a different perspective.
“People are cruel, and this is wrong,” David Ermold, 41, told the Times. He and his partner, David Moore, 39, said they felt humiliated by the license denial.
“Telling people to go to another county is like saying, ‘We don’t want your kind of people here,’ ” Moore said.
Despite a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling recognizing the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry, Gannam says that requiring Davis to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples constitutes government coercion to violate her religious beliefs, explains a USA Today article.
In his Wednesday ruling, U.S. District Court Judge David Bunning said the “purely legal” task of signing off on marriage forms does not require Davis to condone same-sex weddings or restrict her religious activities.
“She may continue to attend church twice a week, participate in Bible study and minister to female inmates at the Rowan County jail,” wrote Bunning. “She is even free to believe that marriage is a union between one man and one woman, as many Americans do. However, her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County clerk.”
