In Kentucky, Rowan County clerk Kim Davis refused to issue marriage licenses for same sex marriage (SSM). To purportedly avoid legal charges of discrimination, she also refused to issue marriage licenses for anyone else too.
According to the US Census FactFinder, a search for “Rowan County, Kentucky,” reveals a population of about 23,000 in less than 9,000 households. Half the households earn less than $35,000 a year in Rowan County, Kentucky. Yet, Kim Davis – whose job is nothing more than a Clerk – lives off the backs of taxpayers with a fat-cat compensation that is more than twice that which half the taxpaying-households in her County even earn.
Kim Davis campaigned to be elected for her job as the petty functionary to enforce marriage control in Rowan County, Kentucky. To be clear: she campaign-promised to do her job, was elected to do so, and now lives off the backs of the low-income taxpayers of Rowan County, Kentucky, as she draws $80,000 a year.
In that context, this low-level Clerk does not have any authority to self-define her job. She is nothing more than a servant inside big government, with no latitude to do anything less than that which her public-sector job mandates.
Moreover, in this matter, she is not doing something that is a matter of her private life. She is not working in a private company. She is not even the owner of a company.
Rather, Kim Davis is but an employee of big government bureaucracy. Her function is to process marriage control, to expedite and issue marriage certificates as defined by the hierarchy of law.
Kim Davis asserted that performing her legally-required job would infringe her religious liberty rights, as she religiously opposes SSM and does not want her name associated with any County-archived record-keeping of same sex marriages. Rather than quit her big government job (so that she may still keep her salary, living off the taxpayers), she just refused to do her job.
Subsequently, ending up in court, a judge ordered her to fulfill her job duties, but she refused. By her own choice of refusal, the judge found her in “contempt of court,” sending her to jail until she would either agree to perform her duties as required or she would resign from the position.
Because Kim Davis still refused to do either option, the Judge found her in “contempt of court” in Miller v. Davis. She was then booked into the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson, Kentucky, on September 3, 2015.
She did not technically break a law (yet); rather, she was sent to jail for being “in contempt of court” for refusing to perform the duties of her big government job – as court-ordered. She always had the free choice to get out of jail at any time of her choosing when she would decide to no longer be “in contempt of court.”
On September 8, 2015, Kim Davis agreed to not prevent the deputies in her office from issuing big government marriage licenses. With that agreement, Kim Davis was freed from jail.
This whole debacle has raised the issue of religious liberty and the use of big government to impose its force against people’s free conscience. The connections – as well as hypocrisies – to the persecution of the religious liberty of UCAPs (unrelated consenting adult polygamists) are many. I will address these in an upcoming post.
Ultimately, I find the last words of Senator Rand Paul at the very end of the above-embedded video to be most relevant of all. Without even knowing it directly, Senator Paul correctly acknowledged the inevitability of the Polygamy Rights Win-Win Solution that States will have to take: Abolish all government marriage control for unrelated consenting adults.
