Jay Hathaway
Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refuses to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, will appeal the contempt of court ruling that put her in jail, her attorney said Friday. Davis has been locked up since Thursday, and her deputies have been granting long-awaited licenses to gay couples in her absence.
Davis’ lawyer Mat Staver—founder of the Christian, stridently anti-gay
law firm Liberty Counsel—said Davis has no intention of resigning or of
granting any same-sex couple a license. He promised to appeal her
contempt ruling by the end of the day.
Staver claimed
that even though the marriage licenses issued while Davis is in jail
don’t have her name on them, they “aren’t worth the paper they’re
printed on” and are void without her authority.
Critics of Staver, a former pastor and Liberty University
law school dean, claim he’s a zealot who may have thrown his client
under the bus by failing to inform her she doesn’t actually have a case.
Right now, Davis is slated to remain in jail for at least
six more days while her deputies carry out their duties as the law
requires. Staver says she’s already started Bible study “by herself.”
Staver compared his client, without apparent irony, to
“people who today we admire, like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jan
Huss, John Bunyan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more.”
[h/t TPM, Photo: Getty Images]
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