How is it that Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, still has her job? She is a government official, being paid by the taxpayers, who is now in jail because she refuses to do her job, even though she has been commanded by the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal judges.
Davis is in isolation at the Carter County Detention Center in Kentucky, with her Bible. U.S. District Judge David Bunning will not release Davis unless she agrees to obey his order. “She’s not going to resign, she’s not going to sacrifice her conscience, so she’s doing what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which is to pay the consequences for her decision,” said Mat Staver, one of Davis’ attorneys and founder of Liberty Counsel.
So how does she have her job? The problem is that Davis is an elected official, so she has to be impeached by the Kentucky state legislature. Not even the governor can fire her. “The future of the Rowan County Clerk is now in the hands of the courts. The legislature has placed the authority to issue marriage licenses squarely on county clerks by statute, and I have no legal authority to relieve her of her statutory duty by executive order or to remove her from office,” Governor Steve Beshear explained. “The General Assembly will convene in four months and can make any statutory changes it deems necessary at that time. I see no need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money calling a special session of the General Assembly when 117 of 120 county clerks are doing their jobs.”
Thus, it looks like Davis will be spending many months in jail, all along having right-wing politicians take advantage of her situation, which in all likelihood they are promoting from behind the scenes, and Davis is merely a puppet in all of it.
