We really,
really didn’t plan on giving these ones a separate entry, but for the sake of
comprehensiveness and because we’ve managed to get some distance to the
silliness: As many remember, Kim Davis was the county clerk of
Rowan County, Kentucky, who became a martyr for the Christian right for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples following the 2015 Obergefell v.
Hodges decision. I.e.: She refused to do her job, and refused to quit, and
after a court order, a lawsuit, being jailed for five days in contempt of
court, and agreeing to an arrangement where her deputies would issue the marriage
licenses instead and she wouldn’t interfere, she promptly interfered. She then
lost her bid for reelection and is currently on wingnut welfare.
Her subsequent
activities include traveling the world as a celebrity with wingnuts like Harry
Mihet on behalf of Liberty Counsel to spread the message that “same-sex ‘marriage’ and
freedom of conscience are mutually exclusive, because those who promote the
former have zero tolerance for the latter.” Emphasizing that connection is
important, since otherwise it would be somewhat tricky to avoid the obvious
tension between what they were actually doing – campaigning against legalizing
same-sex marriage in places like Romania – and what they claimed to be doing: “encouraging religious freedom”.
Of course, their attempt to construe their efforts, including Davis’s refusal
to issue marriage licenses, as a matter of religious freedom is hard to
maintain if one cares at all for the facts, and the mask frequently slips. As
Davis fan Randy Smith, leader of a group of supporters, illuminatingly put it: “at the end of the day,
we have to stand before God, which has higher authority than the Supreme Court”.
Or, in other words: nothing here really has anything to do with either the
Constitution or religious freedom.
After her
antics, Davis quickly acquired a number of fans, including Liberty Counsel (whose founder Mat Staver represented her in court), Focus on the Family and Jim Jordan.
Another
notable fan was the county clerk of Casey County, Kentucky, Casey Davis (not
related, but he apparently views Kim Davis as a “
sister-in-Christ”), who
launched a bike ride across Kentucky ostensibly to bring
attention to the circumstances surrounding Kim – he “cannot let my sister [who
at the time was among the most thoroughly media-covered people in the US] go to
jail without my doing something to let others know about her plight.” Casey
Davis pointed out that forcing him to follow the law is a violation of his rights and that he was prepared to die in the
battle over gay marriage (“if it takes my life, I will die for because I
believe I owe that to the people that fought so I can have the freedom that I
have” – you keep using that word “freedom”; we don’t think it means what
you think it means) and portrayed himself as a victim of the “war on
Christianity”: “Christians just don’t have rights anymore” (i.e. religious
fundies cannot force those who disagree with them to do what they want them to
do) after the Supreme Court’s “unconstitutional” gay marriage decision. He
also emphasized that his job is not to issue marriage licenses to gay people,
but rather to tell gay people that they are going to hell, because
divine laws “supersede” American law. Casey Davis, too, quickly rose to
wingnut fame, for instance by serving as a centerpiece at the Values Voters Summit in 2015.
Here is Kim Davis describing, as she saw
it, the persecution of Kim Davis. The description
leaves little doubt that she deserves an entry here.
Diagnosis:
Befuddled fundies who are deeply confused about the meaning of such basic words
as “freedom”, “right” and “job”, and who deeply endorse their identification as
victims of not being able to force others to live the way they’d like
them to live. The religious right has of course been using them as props for
all they’re worth, but hopefully they’re nearing their expiry date as wingnut
props by now.
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