Kim Davis Won't Resign, Plans to Appeal Contempt Ruling
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.”
