Activists fear Kim Davis’s story could encourage new laws exempting public officials from having to perform duties on religious grounds, as judges and clerks around the country make their views known

When Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky, bucked a US supreme court order to issue marriage licenses to couples in her hometown of Morehead, the 49-year-old was propelled into the national spotlight and characterized as a religious zealot who chose jail time over compliance.



“I never imagined a day like this would come, where I would be asked to violate a central teaching of Scripture and of Jesus Himself regarding marriage,” Davis said in a statement Tuesday.

Kentucky county grants first same-sex couple marriage license after clerk jailed Read more

On Thursday, a federal judge’s decision to jail Davis on a civil contempt charge, after she defied his order to resume the processing such licenses, drew condemnation from religious conservatives across the US and Republican presidential candidates alike.

“Ms. Davis took an oath,” said judge David Bunning on Thursday. “Oaths mean things.”

But her defiance has intensified the rhetoric of opponents to same-sex marriage in Kentucky and on the presidential campaign trail. Furthermore, her case illustrates the growing momentum religious conservatives have gained in small pockets of the US toward parlaying their religious beliefs into legal authority that has complicated marriage efforts for gay couples.

To be sure, the clerk represents a small fraction of judges and clerks in the US who have refused to provide marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of the supreme court’s 26 June decision legalising same sex marriage.

“If the big backlash and the mass resistance that our opponents promised [after the supreme court’s decision] is one clerk from a county of under 25,000 people, I think we’re in very good shape,” Marc Solomon, national campaign director of Freedom to Marry, told the New York Times.

Still, the decision prompted concerns from civil rights advocates who believe Davis may incentivise conservatives to push for additional laws that exempt public officials from performing duties because of their religious beliefs.

Supporters of Davis pointed to a pending bill in the Kentucky state assembly that would allow marriage licenses to be issued that do not bear the clerk’s name. Kentucky governor Steve Beshear, a Democrat, has declined to call a special session to consider the legislation, meaning lawmakers must wait until the assembly reconvenes in January to vote.

Some observers believe enough support exists to ensure passage. The Kentucky house and senate leaders said this week they’ll push for the supposed legislative fix.

“It’s an easy fix to satisfy the clerk’s concerns, and I thought that was a legitimate reason to call a special session,” said House speaker Greg Stumbo, a Democrat.

Richard Dawkins: Kentucky clerk should give up her job or her religion Read more

Elsewhere this week, judges cited novel reasons why they couldn’t conduct typically basic tasks in the wake of marriage equality. 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.

To the south, a string of holdout judges’ clerks persist in Alabama, despite the written orders of federal judges to not discriminate against gay couples and officiate marriages. In the midwest, a pending federal suit filed by a former deputy county clerk in Indiana – the state which drew national attention for its religious freedom restoration act – alleges she was fired for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, despite her “sincerely held” religious beliefs.

That clerk, Linda Summers, said in her complaint that she was deprived of “equal employment opportunities because of her religious beliefs”. Indiana’s neighbor Michigan also drew a sharp rebuke from same-sex marriage proponents this year, after Republican governor Rick Snyder signed a law that allows faith-based adoption agencies to refuse service to gay couples. The law prohibits any “adverse action” against the publicly funded adoption agencies if they deny service on religious grounds.

But, for government employees, it’s perhaps Davis’s case that will offer the most guidance on how courts will treat their claims. The sixth circuit court of appeals unanimously denied Davis’s request to issue a stay on Bunning’s ruling, saying “there’s little or no likelihood” that her case would survive on appeal.

Bunning seemed to agree, highlighting the point several times during the five-hour hearing on Thursday.

Emphasizing he was simply following the direction of the high court, Bunning said: “It’s not my job to tell the supreme court justices they’re wrong.”