The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal brought by former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, a Christian who lost a lawsuit for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple and ordering her office to do the same.
Davis was sued in 2015 for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple because her religious beliefs kept her from doing so, NBC News reported Monday.
“Her latest appeal in the case, brought a decade later, had attracted considerable attention amid fears that the court could overturn the 2015 same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, in the aftermath of the 2022 ruling that overturned the landmark abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade,” the article reads.
Davis’s office in Rowan County refused to grant licenses to couples that included David Moore and David Ermold. They later filed a civil rights lawsuit and the former county clerk was ordered to give them a license. However, when she refused again, she was sent to jail for contempt of court.
According to a Breitbart News article published not long after she was jailed:
Davis is not merely claiming a First Amendment right not to participate in same-sex marriages by issuing a marriage certificate. Such a refusal should be accommodated under the First Amendment in the same way that this country accommodates religious objectors to war: by assigning to noncombat roles those whose faith forbids them from using military weapons.
But as Breitbart News previously reported, Davis is claiming the right to use her governmental power to order all of her deputy clerks and other subordinates that they shall not issue marriages licenses, either. Her personal right to religiously object probably does not extend to using her public-office power to order other government workers to conform to her personal faith-based beliefs.
Although Moore and Ermold eventually got their marriage license, they sought damages for her initial refusal and a jury awarded them $100,000 in damages regarding the case. Davis appealed, lost, then took the issue to the Supreme Court, per the NBC article.
Video footage from 2015 shows Davis denying the licenses:
When the initial controversy erupted, Davis, who has been married several times and had children out of wedlock, was called a hypocrite for refusing to give marriage licenses to gay couples, per Breitbart News.