Around 500 supporters yesterday showed up at the jail where the clerk is incarcerated on contempt charges. They held prayer meetings and sang. It was all put together pretty quickly.
In a demonstration of equality, both the clerk and the judge who had her jailed have received death threats, which seems to be a pretty common occurrence when same-sex marriage is involved; a former clerk in Colorado found that out some 40 years ago:
The couple came in. They asked for a marriage license. And it's the first time I met openly gay people. I said, I don't know if I can do this. And at that point, I went to the district attorney and he said the Colorado marriage code did not specify that marriage had to be between a man and a woman, and therefore, I did it. I honestly did not anticipate the degree of hate. It was threats, people needed to kill me for doing this, and that kind of stuff. And I had entire church congregations writing me that it would be Sodom and Gomorrah in the area. I had a small son, he was about 8, and people would call on the phone and if he answered, they'd spiel their hatred to him. And one day, I walked into my office. I was standing and looking out my window and this horse trailer drives up and some media vans. This cowboy gets out. All of a sudden, it just dawned on me - he was going to ask for a marriage license for his horse. My deputy and I were flipping through the marriage code like crazy, you know, what are we going to do? So the cowboy comes in and asked for a marriage license. And I started taking information. I ask him his name and Dolly's name - Dolly was the horse - and I said, and how old is Dolly? He said, 8. And I put my pen down, calm as could be, and said, well, I'm sorry, but that's too young without parental approval.
All told, she issued licenses to six same-sex couples.
But back to present-day Kentucky - ZZMike uncovered an interesting angle on this brouhaha yesterday, when he ran across an article by long-time law blogger Eugene Volokh, who teaches at UCLA School of Law:
Davis’s objection, it appears (see pp. 40, 133, and 139 of her stay application and attachments), is not to issuing same-sex marriage licenses as such. Rather, she objects to issuing such licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Indeed, she says that she would be content with
Modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name, and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.
Now, this revelation - which has not been widely publicized - adds an entirely different twist to the situation; one that can reasonably be accommodated by the state, inasmuch as she simply does not wish to give the appearance of endorsing same-sex marriages. And while it may be argued that reasonable people would not consider the appearance of her name on the document as an endorsement, she evidently feels otherwise.
Professor Volokh argues that in this context she has a strong case for reasonable accommodation at the state level, as such accommodation would impose no undue burden upon the state or its taxpayers. Her problem is at the federal level, because the federal judiciary cannot mandate a change in the wording of a license document issued by the state of Kentucky.
It seems, then, that the whole issue could be rendered moot by a relatively simple accommodation at the state level.
