She’s back! It’s Kimberly Jean Bailey Wallace McIntyre Davis, the Kentucky county clerk with bumpit hair, epic split ends, and a closetful of denim jumpers, who’s been married four times and went to jail rather than sign a marriage certificate for two same-sex couples 10 years ago. Now she’s filed a Writ of Certiorari with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, asking them to overturn the judgment against her, a $100,000 jury verdict for emotional distress and $260,000 for attorneys fees. Oh, and for the court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges entirely and do away with the right to same-sex marriage, while they’re at it. Biblical marriage for thee, but not for me!
Kim Davis squalling about gay marriage violating her rights is nothing new, she has been filing appeals ever since she lost her first case, the lawsuits against her, and ALL of her appeals.
PREVIOUSLY!
In 2016, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law removing county clerks’ names from marriage license forms, so no poor bigots would ever again be forced to risk eviction from evangelical heaven after Bigot Jesus sees their signatures on marriage licenses. Problem solved, right? Ho ho ho. Nope!
In 2019, the same Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals told her to cut a check for damages and legal fees to the couple who sued her for not doing her job, and pound sand.
And in 2020, in an appeal on the very same case she’s still on about, the Supreme Court turned her down, in a decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito. He lamented it, taking plenty of time to moan some more that Obergefell had created whole new groups of “decent, honorable people” who were now being treated as bigots for refusing to mind their own fucking business about other people’s marriages, but said he was forced to turn down Davis’s petition for not presenting its questions “cleanly.”
Then this very March, a federal appeals court panel decided she could not sue over First Amendment protections because “she is being held liable for state action,” and demanded she pay up AGAIN.
Lots of losing, but that’s our legal system! If you have deep pockets, you can keep on suing and filing as many appeals as you can afford to. And Davis’s law firm, Liberty Counsel, gets millions in donations a year to do nothing but that: Push cases that give the government license to discriminate, under the fig leaf of “religious liberty.” And now the makeup of the Court has changed since that 5-4 Obergefell decision. So Davis has officially asked, yet again, presumably more “cleanly” this time, making hers the first case to officially reach the Supreme Court and ask them to overturn the Obergefell decision.
Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts would be all for it, of course. Alito even wrote about it in his Dobbs concurrence: “we should reconsider [...] Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ [...] we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ [...] overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions.” And in their Obergefell dissents, Alito and Thomas moaned that the real victims here were THEM, because now people have correctly surmised that they are bigots. In Chief Justice John Roberts’s Obergefell dissent, he lamented that the decision would prompt “assaults on the character of fairminded people.” Oh, fuck you. If we start listing out all the disgusting things about Roberts’s character, we would be here all day, the bigotry is just one layer of icing on a very tall Smith Island type cake of moral failures.
And the “error” that Alito talked about there is the right to privacy, and now that the court has chipped that away, other cases like Loving v. Virginia (interracial marriage), Lawrence v. Texas (private, consensual adult sex), and Griswold v. Connecticut (birth control) could be on the block too.
Hey, remember when the bigots were all screaming that gay marriage would lead to people marrying their dogs and their cats, and that never happened? Now they are forced to acknowledge that the only thing damaged here is their feelings, it really hurts their feelings and distresses them so emotionally when people won’t let them impose their underaged-cousinfucker made-up “Christian values” on everybody. That’s it, that’s the argument.
And now Kim Davis and her fellow bigots that nobody in the family invites to Thanksgiving any more want same-sex marriage, and probably those other things too, to be states’ rights things, so they can be in a safe space like Texas or Kentucky and not have to face their self-generated emotional distress. And with this Supreme Court, Davis may finally find a receptive ear.
Also if Kim Davis’s magic bumpit doesn’t do the trick, a judge in Texas, Brian Umphress, is also suing the Texas judicial commission over having to certify marriages, because he doesn’t want to perform any same-sex marriages, and someday theoretically he might have to, and he would say say no, and then he would get disciplined about it, and THAT would be “something akin to racism,” which would injure him most terribly. And he wants a ruling that Obergefell does not override state laws. So that one could get queued up in the chute.
The Supreme Court might not take up Davis’s case at all; just because she filed it doesn’t mean they’ll hear it. But given how ants-in-the-pants the wingnut six have been to destroy any individual rights established since the Magna Carta, and how few shits they give about precedent, and how slobberingly eager they have been for decades to remake the land in their image, it’s also hard to see them passing up the chance.
If the Court does overturn Obergefell, it would not mean millions of people would be instantly divorced. Legal protections for same-sex and interracial marriage were also codified into federal law in the Respect for Marriage Act, which was passed on a bipartisan basis in 2022, and which requires states to recognize marriages performed in any other state as legal. And US v. Windsor in 2013 requires the federal government to recognize any legal marriage. Those two things should still protect the legal status of existing same-sex couples and families at the federal level, and force states to still recognize marriages that already exist. But, the constitutions of 26 states have bans on same-sex marriage and any other types of same-sex unions, and 30 total states have statutes with the same effect, and Obergefell is all that is standing in the way of those states enforcing their bans.
An overturn would mean issuing new marriage licenses could be outlawed at the state level in those states, creating a patchwork of marriage laws which would effectively outlaw it for anyone too poor to travel to a decent state to get married.
If you are in a shitty state and worried, GLAD law has a guide and checklists to help strengthen your family’s standing with the law.
The overturn of Obergefell is far from a done deal. But, on the other hand, it also seems inevitable, given the way everything else is going, and the disgusting bigotry of the SCOTUS six, who cannot even stomach an alphabet book with a rainbow flag in it.
Meanwhile, all over the civilized world LGBTQ+ rights are expanding. Thailand, Estonia, Greece, and Lichtenstein have all legalized same-sex marriage within the past year or so, and Japan is getting closer.
And now here we are in America, with a religious minority of hypocritical evangelical cultists who cannot mind their own fucking business to save their lives, dragging everybody backwards with all their might.
This arc of justice really blows.
Keith Edwards@keithedwards
Fun fact: Gay marriage has now been around longer than the Confederacy.
4:54 PM. 26 Jun 20.
6,332 Retweets. 36.6K Likes
Gay, German billionaire and owner of "VP" BJ Vance, as well as the incredibly evil Palantir Inc., Peter Thiel, has a legally married husband. As does U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent.
How about it, boys?