In reviewing the Davis situation, and the various proposed accommodations, it would appear that Davis and her attorneys are not interested in any compromise short of permitting her to prevent her office from participating in same-sex marriages at all, or requiring specific legislation or action of the governor to accommodate her. In other words, the issue seems to be much bigger than Kim Davis herself.
For instance, when the deputy clerks scratched her name off the licenses while she was in jail, her lawyer said the licenses "were not worth the paper they're written on" even though Kentucky Statute 61.035 says, “Any duty enjoined by law or by the Rules of Civil Procedure upon a ministerial officer, and any act permitted to be done by him, may be performed by his lawful deputy.” At the same time, her most ardent supporters, even her attorney during interviews, has used the discussion to launch an attack on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Obergefell as being illegitimate. The discussion inevitably veers into a discussion that the "activist judges" on the Supreme Court never had the "right" to overrule the "law of God" and "impose" a "new right" of "gay marriage" on a "Christian nation" and that Christians need to "rise up" and defend "the Constitution" against a "godless" Federal bench. If one were to step back from the debate, it is completely naive to believe that even Davis' attorneys realize that their client is in an "unwinnable" position but are instead taking a "civil disobedience" tact to blast the judiciary? It seems like any solution that Davis' attorneys would be satisfied with would allow her to create a Christian "caliphate" where her religious beliefs govern the distribution of civil rights in her county simply as an accommodation to her. The reason I bring this up is that in most accommodation cases there is a simple request for accommodation and then the aggrieved party simply moves on. This seems to be more of a stand for the last bastion of "traditional marriage" in America against the disestablishment of the sacrament of marriage by judicial fiat. If that's the case, should this be considered as an attempt to "establish in law" the "sovereignty of God" which is more akin to what Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore attempted to do when he refused to allow a Ten Commandments monument to be removed from the Alabama State Judiciary despite the imposition of a Federal order rather than a simple individual request of a county clerk for personal accommodation? If this is a Roy Moore situation, does the analysis change? Michael Peabody, Esq. ReligiousLiberty.TV http://www.religiousliberty.tv _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Religionlaw@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/religionlaw Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
