Before we get into the latest news, let’s clear something up. If you are indeed holding a belief that leaves you sincerely opposed to gay marriage then there is a key question for you to seriously consider – What are you ethically and morally entitled to do if you are opposed to gay marriage?
The answer is rather simple, if somebody of the same sex proposes to you then you simply decline their kind offer. That’s it, that is all you get to do. Doing literally anything beyond that crosses a line. There is what is known as the golden rule. It can be found in the bible and also via other similar texts – do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or to be a tad more specific, don’t go sticking your nose into other peoples relationships, especially if you don’t want them to do the same to you.
Gay bigotry is not a moral question, nor is it an ethical stance, instead is is just a weird religious rule.
“But the Bible says …“, no, stop right there. That’s just your flawed interpretation of the text. It is actually possible to interpret the Bible in an LGBTQ+-affirming way. Doing that involves recognizing that the Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn loving, same-sex relationships, and that many passages can be understood in ways that support LGBTQ+ inclusion. However, I’m not here to quibble about such interpretations, principally because I’m not a fan of that book club, so I quite frankly don’t care two hoots about what you think somebody wrote down a few thousand years ago. Much of society as a whole has risen far above all that.
OK, let’s get into a bit of detail regarding Kim Davies. You might, or might not know her name. I’ll assume you do not, and I will start at the beginning.
What did Kim Davies do?
Back in June 2015, (yes, it really has now been over a decade), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case of Obergefell v. Hodges. This established the fundamental right to marry for same-sex couples and leans upon both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
One month later, in July 2015, Kim Davies, who was at that time the county clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky managed to gain a lot of both national and also international attention – She decided that her religious bigotry Trumped the law, and so she refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Her “solution” was not to be gay specific, but to simply deny licences to all couples.
She then got sued by various couples who had been denied their basic rights, for example Miller v. Davis. She lost and was ordered to issue marriage licenses. She then appealed to the US Supreme court, but they quite rightly turned her down.
So she then decided, “Fuck it, I’m operating under the authority of God” and still refused to issue marriage licenses. As you might guess, off to jail she goes for contempt of court. After five days they let her out under the strict condition that she must not interfere with her deputy clerks issuing licenses.
It generated media scrum that in turn triggered a bit of a screaming match that involved the Evangelicals screaming “Persecution”, and everybody else pointing out “Er … no”.
Religious Accommodation
She is not the first person in US history to face a conflict between her beliefs and her assigned duties at her place of work.
Here are some examples …
- How about the case from 1979 that involved an IRS employee who had religious objections to working on tax exemption applications for organizations that promoted abortion.
- Then there was the 2011 case of a Jehovah’s Witness who had religious objections to raising a flag
- There are many nurses who, for religious reasons, feel that they cannot personally assist in an abortion in any way
The list goes on and on, staff who will not, for religious reasons, handle alcohol or pork, or work on a specific day. So how do we square this circle and cope with the need to not discriminate and also at the same time accommodate religious people who can’t do the job for religious reasons?
Actually the law is rather clear, Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act directs employers to accommodate religious employees on the understanding that doing so does not cause any “undue hardship,” (translation: costs an excessive sum to sort out). So what this means is that normally people work things out by simply delegating – “I’m sorry Mr Smith, I’m afraid I’ll not be able to assist, but my colleague over there will be right over to help you“.
Where Kim Davis got this very wrong is that she refused to step aside and permit any of her colleagues to step in and issue a marriage certificate. In her case, as county clerk her name was still on the license, and she objected to even that.
An Accommodation was made
In Nov 2015 newly elected Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin issued an executive order to remove clerks’ names from the state marriage licenses. That gave Davis the accommodation needed, and so Kim Davis and her attorneys at Liberty Counsel immediately requested that the court dismiss her appeals, because this new regulation provides a religious accommodation for her and makes the cases against her moot.
District judge David L. Bunning agreed, and dismissed all three cases filed against her.
Ah but no, Life is never that simple
One of the plaintiff couples who sued, said, “Hang on, she still owes us $230,000 in legal fees“
That triggered a lot of legal huffing and puffing (I’ll save you the blow by blow details) – basically it ended up with Gov Bevin taking the stance four years on in 2019 that it was, “Not our responsibility, she broke the law, not us“, and so Davies was potentially personally libel for these fees, a consequence of her own stupid actions.
Various cases rumble away about it all, and then another four years later in 2022 a rather important ruling gets issued by Judge Bunning...
Bunning reasoned that Davis “cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official.”
“It is readily apparent that Obergefell recognizes Plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment right to marry,” the judge wrote, referencing the landmark same-sex marriage Obergefell decision. “It is also readily apparent that Davis made a conscious decision to violate Plaintiffs’ right.”
This decision opened the legal door for plaintiffs to seek legal fees and potentially other damages from Davis through a jury trial.
In 2023 a jury ordered Davis to pay $100,000 in damages, and then a bit later in Jan 2024 the judge added in $246,026.40 in attorneys’ fees.
It got appealed and lost – that that takes us to March 2025.
Moment of Impact
Now we reach July 24, 2025 and with it comes an appeal to SCOTUS.
It is that July 24th filing that has made all the news. Yes it was a few weeks ago, the media have simply been catching up. What she is asking SCOTUS to do is to not only overturn the Davis case ruling, but additionally to also overturn the Obergefell decision.
(Thud) – Here is that legal petition to a rather corrupt SCOTUS
And there it is, the push to obliterate basic human rights for all gay couples and instead impose religious bigotry.
I will add a few bits of comfort. Many many petitions get filed with SCOTUS and most of them do not get picked up. All gets reviewed and so in due course SCOTUS will list the few cases of legal importance they are picking up and list the other 800 or so that they will not be picking up.
Newsweek polled a group of legal experts asking what SCOTUS might now do, the overall conclusion is that while it is possible, it is also highly unlikely they will take this case up.
The deeply scary part here is that in normal circumstances Davis’s arguments do not merit further attention, but there is nothing “normal” going on with SCOTUS at the moment. Marriage equality is settled law … but … SCOTUS is deeply compromised and also willing to issue judgements that conflict with the actual facts when it suits them to do so. (For example the Bremerton case).
Hopefully SCOTUS, every the deeply corrupt justices, can read the guidance that the Sixth Circuit issued in March 2025 about how utterly crazy things could get if they seriously did side with the stance Davies is taking…
…it is not difficult to imagine the dire possibilities that might follow if Davis’s argument were accepted. A county clerk who finds interracial marriage sinful could refuse to issue licenses to interracial couples. An election official who believes women should not vote could refuse to count ballots cast by females. A zoning official personally opposed to Christianity could refuse to permit the construction of a church. All these officials would have wielded state power to violate constitutional rights—but they would have followed their conscience, which Davis believes provides a “defense to liability”…
…That is not how the Constitution works. In their “private lives”… government officials are of course free to express their views and live according to their faith. But when an official wields state power against private citizens, her conscience must yield to the Constitution…
So fingers crossed that SCOTUS don’t open Pandora’s legal box with this.
A Few Further Observations
Kim Davies has taken the stance that she has been motivated to preserve the “sanctity of marriage” by denying same sex couples marriage licenses.
So, remembering the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, let’s briefly turn a spotlight upon the marriage record of God’s self-appointed marriage sanctifier, Kim Davies.
This is a woman who…
- Married Dwain Wallace, then had twins via a guy who was not her husband, Thomas McIntryre.
- She then divorced Dwain Wallace and married Joe Davis
- Then she divorced Joe Davis and married Thomas McIntryre
- After about a year, she decided nope, and divorced Thomas McIntryre and remarried Joe Davis
If you can keep track of all that, from the person for whom the “sanctity of marriage” is important, then you are a better person than me, because my head is spinning not just at the complexity of it all, but the deep olympic class degree of hypocrisy that is also in play here.
To put it all another way, what we can actually observe is religiously motivated bigotry being joined in holy matrimony with gross hypocrisy, which these days is not an exception but rather is a core fundamental of modern evangelicalism.
We really do have a serious border crises, the dividing wall erected between church and state is being rapidly eroded.
Tweets
- Link to the above Aug 11, 2025 ABC News article – here