By Darren Smith Weekend Contributor
After the Rowan County Kentucky Clerk, Democrat Kim Davis, defied a court order to issue gay couples marriage licenses, and was subsequently arrested by the U.S. Marshal’s Service and jailed, her husband stated that she chose to remain in jail rather than compromise her religious beliefs by performing her statutory duty. Her contempt of court ruling will stand until she resumes issuing such licenses and thus in jail she shall remain.
And so it should.
The issue is not the content of her religious beliefs that are on trial. It is that of failure to perform her duty and denial of a civil right as mandated by the Supreme Court. For this reason she has two choices: being in contempt indefinitely; or resigning her position. For the near term it is as simple as that. If she continues her defiance, a third party must step up, show some leadership, and make the decision for her by ejecting her from office.
When a politician takes an oath of office upon their swearing in they affirm to uphold the constitutions of their respective states and that of the United States, and that they will discharge also their statutory and common law duties mandated by the legislature and the state’s courts. This is not an optional recommendation, it is conditional of receiving the position and taking salary and benefits. In this case Ms. Davis knew, as a second generation politician to her mother’s thirty seven year tenure as the former county clerk, what these duties encompass. The excuses she made to justify her failure to perform on her duty are 100% irrelevant whatever they might be, religious, personal or otherwise. Her authority does not include usurping the legislature and the courts to suit her own goals.
Ms. Davis, through her attorney, claimed that a compromise can be made by the removal of her name from the certificates of marriage granted to those couples she objects to. This also is completely unacceptable. The duality of this settlement offer is that she previously stated the certificates issued by her deputy clerks, in her absence, were void.
The authorization official charged with issuing marriage licenses is that of the County Clerk, and from working convention is usually performed by a deputy delegated and commissioned through this authority. If Ms. Davis chooses to remove her name from the form, the marriage license could be contested as being invalid since it was not assented to by the county clerk. For this reason she implored the governor to call the legislature into a special session to amend the statutory language to facilitate the compromise that would be agreeable to this one individual politician–at a cost of course of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hubris and arrogance she exudes on that demand alone certainly should be enough cause for the legislature to impeach her or the voters to generate a recall. If this becomes necessary to remove her from office a failure to act upon this by either entity and allow this usurper to remain in office would be a true embarrassment to themselves in the eyes of a great many.
Anecdotally, all of us who have worked in an official capacity know that sometimes you cannot do what you like. We cannot legally make arbitrary actions that are outside the law. To do so leads straight to corruption and an erosion of the system and the liquidity of society. The result is almost always a patchwork of patronage and differing rules and the abandonment of trust in the public that ultimately grants the government its legitimacy. The controversy is this, we stop malfeasances of office now before they lead to worse.
Not only that but in addition to moneys wasted in salary payable to an incarcerated elected official–who is unable to perform her job–it is all but certain expensive lawsuits alleging violations of civil rights will result. It is an outcome frankly the county government deserves.
Ms. Davis clearly wants to have her cake and eat it too. She reportedly takes an $80,000.00 salary along with benefits. In addition, she has family members within the employ of her office. This is why I personally find political dynasties to be in direct conflict with democracy, because it almost always leads to nepotism at least and despotism at worse. The Rowan County Clerk’s Office seems a great family business for the Davis family because that is how she seems to choose to operate it. But as the Rolling Stones famously sang…
It is time that Kim Davis “gets what she needs”…termination of her employment.
By Darren Smith
Source:
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
Besides, you’re still wrong about SCOTUS. It was merely conducting an age old tradition of affirming the direction the majority of the country was taking.
All commenters should read and re-read Alan Tiger’s comment at 10:42 am.
No one is being jailed because they are “Christian. ” they are being jailed because they violated a court order. Same as Susan McDougal. Plus I know self-professed Christians who support same sex marriage, and I know self-professed Christians who are opposed to same sex marriage. And I know non-Christians who are opposed to (and who support) same sex marriage.
And now the vapid, inane cartoons from the middle school contingent. It has been pretty good up until now, but some folks just never got out of middle school.
Agreed, this woman is out for her fifteen minutes +. As for locking her up, I just think Bunning is adhering to the same law and order philosophy his father espoused throughout his lifetime.
http://s5.postimg.org/vchi5n5yf/rosa_kim.jpg
I don’t engage trolls. Particularly old ones w/ new monikers. Multiple anonymous monikers is the height of cowardice.
Kerry,
THIS version…
I read people for a living. This woman is an attention whore. But again, you folks who don’t know the way things work, this conservative judge did something rare, imprisoning someone on a civil contempt violation. He made her a martyr. The plaintiffs who were seeking to get married DID NOT WANT THAT. This is curious, if you have a curious mind.
Nick: As usual, you’re wrong. SCOTUS was not ahead of the nation in their gay marriage ruling since 34 states had already made it legal. And as usual, your blather about lawyers just blurs whatever point, right or wrong, you were trying to make.
Please tighten it up.
I did not compare this woman to a baker having a religious objection. I said I will hold my fire for when that righteous baker is imprisoned. Then, I’ll go to war. This woman is not the same, and certainly not as worthy. I think she should go on a hunger strike. She could hold out for months.
SCOTUS got ahead of the political process in Roe v Wade. They did the same in gay marriage. Regarding getting the govt. out of marriage licensing and making it a strictly contractual deal. I know the ABA would be orgasmic about that. If you don’t think much of the impetus in gay marriage was the ABA wanting a new market for divorce, well..you don’t know attorneys. But, to have attorneys billing couples getting married and divorced, they are salivating!
Comparing this woman to a baker who won’t make a wedding cake for gay couples is like comparing apples and oranges. This woman took an oath of office and is now unwilling to perform the duties of the office to which she was elected. If she doesn’t want to sit in jail for contempt, she can either start doing the job she was elected to do, or she can resign. Simple as that. If she doesn’t want to do her job, she should go get a new one. @Nick Spinelli
Agreed. The proper thing for this woman to do is to resign… I am not supportive of the gods called judges, playing judge jury and executioner without any due process. I have huge issues with judges playing god. If she broke a law she needs a jury trial at the very least.
InalienableWrights, I’m not sure I agree with you. In reviewing Colonial records, 17th century, the first New England marriage was conducted by Miles Standish who observed that there was no requirement for a minister to perform a marriage, so he, a soldier, did it. A review of the various New England vital records, official “state” records, finds marriages recorded, regardless of who performed the ceremony. They also show of women and sometimes men who fornicated outside the bounds of matrimony, indicating an interest in who was married to whom, when. Once the banes were published, a man backing out of the wedding could be subject to a lawsuit and fined. Each of these indicate that the state was involved in marriage. While this pre-dates the Constitution, it shows the interest of the state in marriage that has continued.
Betty, I don’t think the state being involved in marrying people was widespread at all until (historically speaking) the push to make the state sanctioned marriages the norm, was after the civil war to prevent whites and blacks from marrying.
The bottom line for me is that state marriages are not a right, they are a permission as evidenced by the strings attached. Two people can enter into a private marriage contract however, that is a right, and gay couples have every right to do so. The best answer IMHO is for everyone to eschew state involvement in anyone’s marriage.
Boy, I miss Professor Turley’s objective broad view of the issues on weekends. Smith tends to latch onto a position and dance off gloating with it, which is the opposite of why I come here. Easy solution, I guess – skip the days when Smith is at the helm. I don’t have a horse in this Kentucky clerk race, but if I want to find objective discussion on the matter, I have to skip the commentary and head right for the comments. Always a good balance in there, anyway.
Olly,
She’s serving what… 3/5ths the population. That’s good enough for Dredd Scott, NO?
Olly,
RE: BIGOT
“I am unaware of any statements from her that indicated that was the case. ”
= = =
If the bigots gonna bigot, then…
Kentucky gay marriage row: Rally for jailed clerk Kim Davis
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34165773
Justice Holmes
The woman is clearly an adulterer, Romans 7: 2 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.
3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.
But what does Romans mean to a salad bar Christian anyways, except Chapter 1 vs. 27, anyways?
Not all that recently. As one example: the common law concepts of “dower” and “curtesy” (spousal inheritance rights requiring, among other things, “a valid marriage”) date back to early England.
But the concept itself traces back to Roman law concerning marriage. Yep. Roman law on marriage. But we can go further back… all the way to the Code of Hammurabi.
Sorry Fiver but my great grandparents were not married by the state. They completed a private contract by signing their names in the family bible as did most of their generation. Regardless the state does not create a right and you do not need the state to complete the contract of marriage.
jonolan,
If she were a Muslim… imagine the FOXNews coverage then.
Some interesting News:
A Tennessee judge declared the high court’s landmark decision to legalise same-sex marriage rendered him unable to divorce a couple. The couple remain legally married – against their wishes – after Hamilton County chancellor Jeffrey Atherton said the supreme court had “deemed” Tennessee residents “incompetent” to define marriage, “and thereby, at minimum, contested divorces”.
According to the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Atherton wrote in his decision: “With the U.S. Supreme Court having defined what must be recognized as a marriage, it would appear that Tennessee’s judiciary must now await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court as to what is not a marriage, or better stated, when a marriage is no longer a marriage.”
In North Carolina, the state’s court system reported this week that 5% of its magistrate judges have recused themselves from practicing civil marriages. Their refusal stems from authority granted under a recent state law that exempts court officials from conducting a marriage if they say they have a “sincerely held religious objection” to gay marriage.