ASHLAND, Ky. — A Kentucky county clerk who has become a symbol of religious opposition to same-sex marriage was jailed Thursday after defying a federal court order to issue licenses to gay couples.
The clerk, Kim Davis of Rowan County, Ky., was ordered detained for contempt of court and later rejected a proposal to allow her deputies to process same-sex marriage licenses that could have prompted her release.
Instead, on a day when one of Ms. Davis’s lawyers said she would not retreat from or modify her stand despite a Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, Judge David L. Bunning of United States District Court secured commitments from five of Ms. Davis’s deputies to begin providing the licenses. At least two couples planned to seek marriage licenses Friday.
Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk of courts, shut her office door after denying a marriage license to a same-sex couple in Morehead, Ky., on Wednesday.Kentucky Clerk Who Said ‘No’ to Gay Couples Won’t Be Alone in Court,
“The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order,” Judge Bunning said. “If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”
The judge’s decision to jail Ms. Davis, a 49-year-old Democrat who was elected last year, immediately intensified the attention focused on her, a longtime government worker who is one of three of Kentucky’s 120 county clerks who contend that their religious beliefs keep them from recognizing same-sex nuptials. Within hours of Ms. Davis’s imprisonment, some Republican presidential candidates declared their support for her, a sign that her case was becoming an increasingly charged cause for Christian conservatives.
“Today, judicial lawlessness crossed into judicial tyranny,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, said in a statement.
A lawyer for Ms. Davis, Roger Gannam, sharply criticized the ruling and portrayed it as a stark warning to Christians across the country.
“Today, for the first time in history, an American citizen has been incarcerated for having the belief of conscience that marriage is the union of one man and one woman,” Mr. Gannam said after a hearing that stretched deep into Thursday afternoon. “And she’s been ordered to stay there until she’s willing to change her mind, until she’s willing to change her conscience about what belief is.”
In Washington, the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said he had not discussed the judge’s decision with President Obama, but he added that it was not up to Ms. Davis to defy the Supreme Court.
“Every public official in our democracy is subject to the rule of law,” Mr. Earnest said. “No one is above the law. That applies to the president of the United States and that applies to the county clerk of Rowan County, Ky., as well.”
Judge Bunning’s decision went beyond the wishes of the couples who sued the clerk this summer; their lawyers had asked that she be fined. Some advocates for gay rights quickly expressed concern that Ms. Davis’s jailing would make her a sympathetic figure to religious conservatives and prompt lawmakers in Kentucky and elsewhere to push for new laws carving out exemptions for public officials who oppose same-sex marriage. But they also described Ms. Davis as an outlier.
“I think this is a tempest in a teapot,” said Marc Solomon, national campaign director of Freedom to Marry, which was active in the push for same-sex marriages to be recognized. “If the big backlash and the mass resistance that our opponents promised is one clerk from a county of under 25,000 people, I think we’re in very good shape.”
Ms. Davis’s appearance before Judge Bunning, and her subsequent detention, was a signal development in a case that surfaced soon after the Supreme Court’s ruling in June. Faced with the ruling, Ms. Davis, an Apostolic Christian, directed her office to stop providing marriage licenses to any applicants.
“Marriage is between one man and one woman,” Ms. Davis said during a frequently tearful turn on the witness stand on Thursday. When Mr. Gannam, one of her lawyers, asked whether she approved of same-sex marriage, she replied, “It’s not of God.”
The legal odyssey of Ms. Davis, who was being held Thursday night at a county detention center, began with a ruling last month that ordered her to issue licenses. The Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and, on Monday, the United States Supreme Court denied her requests to prevent the order from taking effect.
Ms. Davis’s decision on Tuesday to refuse licenses to same-sex couples led to the contempt hearing, and she testified that she had not hesitated to maintain her opposition to licensing same-sex couples.
“I didn’t have to think about it,” Ms. Davis said. “There was no choice there.”
But after seeing their boss jailed, most of Ms. Davis’s deputy clerks said Thursday that they were willing to break from her demands and comply with Judge Bunning’s order, even if they did so with deep reluctance.
“I don’t really want to, but I will follow the law,” one deputy, Melissa Thompson, told the judge. “I’m a preacher’s daughter, and this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Another deputy clerk, Nathan Davis, who is also Ms. Davis’s son, said he would not issue licenses, but Judge Bunning did not impose any penalties against him.
On Friday, the focus of the case will shift back to Morehead, where the clerk’s office is. Despite lingering disputes about whether Ms. Davis’s deputies have the authority to act without her explicit consent, couples are expected to begin receiving marriage licenses Friday morning.
“We expect at the end of the day for the court’s orders to be complied with,” Judge Bunning told a crowded, quiet courtroom. “That’s how things work here in America.”
Amid complex questions about the scope of the judge’s authority and the application of Kentucky law, it was unclear how long Ms. Davis might remain jailed. Civil contempt is a murky area that is largely dependent on the discretion of the judge whose will has been defied.
“Civil contempt is not supposed to be punitive; it’s supposed to coerce the person to obey the judge’s order,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Once she promises to obey, or once the judge determines that more jail time will not encourage her to obey, they’ll let her out. But she could be in there for a year; it’s conceivable. Judges really don’t like it when people disobey their order.”
Jurists like Judge Bunning have few options to prod compliance, but they are powerful: fines or incarceration. The legal issue — that no one, whether a government or an individual engaged in civil disobedience has standing to flout a court order — is well established.
The standoff here, many law professors said, is somewhat reminiscent of the 1960s civil rights battles, with Ms. Davis in the role of George C. Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to try to block its integration.
“In a way, she’s out George Wallace-ing George Wallace,” said Howard M. Wasserman, a law professor at Florida International University. “It does now feel like the civil rights era, with people ignoring court orders, taking a stand and being held in contempt.”
And Judge Bunning’s decision to jail Ms. Davis, instead of fining her as her challengers sought, came as a surprise in the courtroom and well beyond Ashland.
“It’s unusual for the court to go beyond what the plaintiffs asked for,” Suzanna Sherry, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, said.
Judge Bunning, however, said from the bench that he believed fining Ms. Davis would “not bring about the desired result of compliance.”
With Ms. Davis jailed, the agreements by her deputy clerks left gay and straight couples poised to receive marriage licenses in the county for the first time in months.
“We’re going to the courthouse tomorrow to get our marriage license; we’re very excited about that,” said April Miller, who sued after she and her partner were denied a license. “We’re saddened by the fact that Ms. Davis has been incarcerated. We look forward to tomorrow; as a couple, it will be a very important day in our lives.”
A lawyer for the couples, William Sharp, said Thursday’s ruling demonstrated that “religious liberty is not a sword with which government, through its employees, may impose particular religious beliefs on others.”
Outside the courthouse, protesters expressed disparate messages. The rainbow flag, a symbol of the gay rights movement, was on display along with signs that carried messages like “Sodomy is sin.” Some people shouted their opinions through loudspeakers and megaphones, and faced off, sometimes inches apart, with their opponents.
After the ruling, Ms. Davis’s husband, Joe Davis, was among those unhappy with the proceedings inside.
“Tell Judge Bunning,” Mr. Davis said, “he’s a butt.”
This is a fascinating case because its shown what institutionalization of gay rights has created. The case itself is uninteresting, no different than any other social issue that the law has been used for. Instead, pay attention to how liberals are approaching the issue and their justifications for her incarceration.
Here are the main ones I've picked up: the law is supreme over personal morality; the idea of genuine belief or salvation is impossible (this woman is three times divorced and a christian for her own convenience); ideas must be put on a democratic marketplace (you are free to get another job if you do not like work); people on the "wrong side of history" are simply outdated and must be ignored (this takes the form of 'martyrdom' itself being outdated mimicry of Christ's example and 'prejudice' being a dated, pre-Obama ideology); this is a ploy to become a successful entrepreneur on fox news like Sarah Palin or Joe Plummer; the Republican menace and 'bigoted' southern whites are the real power here that resent the accomplishments of liberalism.
These are the vague beliefs of liberalism about every issue, what's unique about this case is that Republicans have already been absorbed into neoliberal marketization of ideology. Only the fringe candidates are standing up for this woman. The Republican-Evangelical alliance has fallen apart while the homonationalist alliance has become fully mainstream. Also, not once have I seen someone positively assert the moral value of gay rights as worthy of revolutionary terror, instead the entire idea of authentic belief is mocked and commodified. Finally, the violence of the state will provoke a reaction from Evangelicals, this is a turning point in which homonationalism becomes part of the state of exception. Whether this leads to a populist reaction or a radical queer-black-white working class revolutionary movement is unclear, what is clear that this marks the historical endpoint of liberal gay rights as a progressive force.
the law is supreme over personal morality
well it should be
babyhueypnewton posted:this is a ploy to become a successful entrepreneur on fox news like Sarah Palin or Joe Plummer
Good luck!
walkinginonit posted:Because queerness will never, ever be co-opted by liberalism
"The more resistive (that is, on the outside) X is imagined to be, the more unavoidably it is to lose its specificity (that is, become appropriated) in the larger framework of the systematic production of differences, while the circumstances that make this framework possible that is, that enable it to unfold and progress as a permanent self-regulating interiority) remain unchallenged. This is, I believe, one reason why so many new projects of articulating alternative identities, cultures, and group formations often seem so similar in the end. Whether what is in question is a particular ethnic work or the identity of an ethnic person, what has become predictable-literally already spoken-is precisely the compulsive invocation of difference with interchangeable terms such as "ambivalence," "multiplicity," "hybridity," "heterogeneity," "disruptiveness," "resistance," and the like; and no matter how new an object of study may appear to be, it is bound to lose its novelty once the process of temporal differencing is set into motion."
-Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target
Queerness or queering is the reification of difference and opposition as a political strategy, method of analysis, lifestyle, and all the other things that replace metanarratives in the postmodern. That it takes the form of gender and sexuality is a historical contingency, queerness is the highest expression of 'nomadic' politics of resistance and has spread its form to all ideologies and movements from occupy, the BLM movement, and yes even the gay marriage movement at its grassroots level.
So in this sense, it already has been co-opted, or at least is part of the same logic as the liberalism it opposes. But practically, it probably has been co-opted as postmodern academia has become increasingly alienated from the real conditions of the long depression and has become more and more reactionary.
littlegreenpills posted:your entire post could have come from drudge report
Republican conservativism is a real ideology rooted in the material. While Democrats v. Republicans is sold to you as a football game, they do represent certain coalitions of capital conglomorates, labor aristocracy, and oppressed people which have staying power.
For example, on the issues of state surveillance, imperialism, and political correctness (the liberal tolerance for the Other), republicans are able to think about the issues with clarity. Unfortunately the U.S. government is the most repressive and disciplined state in world history so the republican populism of Trump, Ron/Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, etc. has no importance at all in governmentality. But look at the "Libya" scandal that republicans attacked Hilldawg for and democrats dismissed as conspiracy. This focus and the investigations that have come out of it have gotten far closer to the truth of the U.S. creation of ISIS and influence on the Arab Spring than any other Western political movement, including leftist darling Jeremy Corbin who has become another apologist for imperialism:
http://sonsofmalcolm.blogspot.kr/2015/09/corbyn-keeps-within-imperialist.html
If we want to look at the political effects of liberalism on radical movements, republicans are the only ones capable of touching the truth, even if it's through a fog of xenophobia and paranoia.
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RedMaistre posted:I agree that American culture war discourse is virtually across the board stultifying garbage. Applying sensationalist terms like 'Homofascism', however, to cases like the jailing of Kim Davis is a perpetuation of the same.
Well yeah this is still neo-LF with its long history of trolling. I don't actually think it's fascist 
The judge rejected such arguments during the daylong set of hearings. Bunning said he has his own religious beliefs as a Catholic, and Kim Davis is welcome to hers. But she cannot, as a public servant, put her religious beliefs above a Supreme Court decision and his preliminary injunction of Aug. 12, ordering her to resume issuing marriage licenses, Bunning said.
Following Davis' logic, Bunning said, a Catholic county clerk could refuse to give a marriage license to a divorced applicant without proof that the previous marriage was annulled, as church doctrine requires.
Seems reasonable enough. (Also interesting as one of the odder instances of the long running rivalry between Evangelicalism and Catholicism in America…)
If public officials wish to disobey statutes they are charged with enforcing, regardless of whether they are right or wrong, they can't claim a legal right of nullification. The rule of a law is incompatible with recognizing the unlimited right of every private subjectivity to reject it as they see fit. If individuals wish to challenge the rightness of a government’s decrees extra-legally, they should recognize that this is in fact what they are doing, and not seek absolution from the state whose authority they reject.This is not a consecration of blind idolatry to the state, bourgeois or otherwise, but a neccessary consequence of the assertion of the irreducability of conscience. What posits itself as superior to the community can not in the same breath demand that the community should serve it as its unfailing crutch.
babyhueypnewton posted:But look at the "Libya" scandal that republicans attacked Hilldawg for and democrats dismissed as conspiracy.
if you actually pay attention to what they talk about they're only concerned that hillary wasn't liquidating The Enemy with enough alacrity
e: oh you said you agreed it wasnt fascism, nvm
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Fuck don't doxx me
Edited by RedMaistre ()
Themselves posted:Fuck don't doxx me
gyrofry posted:jools blog located: http://freecriticizm.blogspot.com/2015/08/faggot-balls-once-again-on-jmp-first.html
damn this guy owns. faggot balls
its almost as if they WANTED to create a new culture hero for conservative christians to rally behind....
Superabound posted:serious question why didnt they just fire her?
its almost as if they WANTED to create a new culture hero for conservative christians to rally behind....
i had this discussion with some comrades. we decided that a contempt of court charge was far more reasonable an option than the hassle of a frivolous-but-likely wrongful termination suit, confronting the union, etc, especially since that kind of drawn out process would be far more likely to martyr her.
Holding her in jail in contempt of court is the right thing to do until she resigns or complies.
Resignation is the proper thing to do if your conscience doesnt allow you to perform your job, but I suspect the ultimate root of this particular case of obstinacy is that this is rural kentucky and she's paid getting 80k/year plus got to hire her son to the same job. If she walks away they've probably got no prospects for a living.
Panopticon posted:having multiple accounts on a site should be illegal. there should be a global biometric database linked to internet access.
what makes you think there isn't 
Superabound posted:which is more Fascist: refusing to administer licenses for intimate romantic relationships, or requiring them in the first place
they're only licenses to enter into a contract to be recognized by the state as a quasi corporate body for certain purposes, which isn't inherently fascist. the intimate relationship is unregulated and so is its recognition by any given religion. the only issue here is a propaganda effort to make a big deal out of how america the state is not following god's path