Kim Davis ordered to pay over $260,000 after denying same-sex couple marriage license

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02 January 2024

Former Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, the pentecostal evangelical Christian who made international headlines in 2015, has now been ordered to pay a total of more than $360,000 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a local same-sex couple that year, ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in support of marriage equality.

Davis, who once told supporters she is a “soldier for Christ,” was ordered by U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning on Tuesday to pay attorneys of the couple $260,104 in fees and expenses, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports. She previously was ordered by a jury to pay the couple, David Ermold and David Moore, a total of $100,000 in damages. In March of 2022 a federal judge found Davis had violated the couple’s constitutional rights.

While the elected county clerk, Davis was jailed for several days after defying a court order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Citing her personal religious beliefs, she had claimed she issued marriage licenses under “God’s authority,” and refused.

“The question is simple — did Davis knowingly violate the law? The answer here is clear — yes,” Judge Bunning wrote in 2022. “Ultimately, this Court’s determination is simple — Davis cannot use her own constitutional rights as a shield to violate the constitutional rights of others while performing her duties as an elected official.”

Several couples sued Davis, who lost but appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to take her case.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, now embattled in a series of serious ethics scandals, used the opportunity to attack the 2015 Obergefell ruling, which found the U.S. Constitution provides same-sex couples with the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as different-sex couples.

Thomas claimed Davis “may have been one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision, but she will not be the last.”

“Due to Obergefell, those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul of Obergefelland its effect on other antidiscrimination laws,” Thomas wrote in 2020, five years after the decision, which did not produce the effect he claimed.

Davis lost her re-election race in 2018 to a Democrat.

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