Actually she’s in jail for defying the lower court, not the Supremes. She appealed the court order to higher courts and then the Supremes, and got told “no, the court was allowed to do that”, but it’s the lower court that issued the order. (And it’s probably civil contempt, not criminal contempt.)
By refusing to issue marriage licenses to people who don’t meet her religion’s moral directions, she’s establishing her religion as the official one for her county. The First Amendment’s quite explicit about not allowing establishment of religion, and she’s quite explicit that she’s doing it for religious reasons, not for some vague “definition of marriage” or “state’s interest in protecting the hypothetical children that ‘Natural Law’ makes it totally impossible for gay people to have” or other pretense at secular purpose.
There’s also the problem that somehow it was only gay people who violate her religion’s moral rules that she wouldn’t issue license to, and she wasn’t asking opposite-sex couples whether they complied with her religion, and while she’s resisting by (correctly) not issuing license to anybody, somehow it’s only the gay people who are an issue, not other sinners.
Kentucky law does allow other people to issue licenses if the clerk is absent; it wouldn’t be fair to prevent somebody from getting married just because the clerk’s on vacation or out sick. I doubt the law spells out whether “sitting in her office sulking” constitutes legal absence, but she’s forbidden the clerks who work for her from doing so.
Because she defied repeated direct court orders to do her job or to let her entire department do theirs, and was held in contempt. The judge had two punishment options open to them: jail time or monetary fines. They correctly stated that levying a fine would be pointless, because she could easily hold a fundraiser to pay off any fines without them being any burden or punishment. Thus, jail time.
Isn’t that only possible when she’s actually processing the request? Before the request, she didn’t break the law yet (not counting the already-broken count), after declining it she broke it, but between the requests she is not breaking any law (just intending to)?
That Hitler salute she’s throwing in the accompanying photo is . . . Interesting.
Edit to add: not that I think she’s consciously doing a hitler salute. But the similarity is striking. Maybe it’s a natural-ish “I’m in charge here, and you are to obey me” kind of motion, and so maybe that’s why the Nazi’s adopted/co-opted it.
Also a point of view. If we were lawyers, we could spend an enjoyable - and, in the right context, perhaps even billable - time with pointless bickering about which one is more valid.
Perhaps she is an enlightened radical.
She must know that it is wrong for the secular state to be involved in a religious sacrament and that it is not a victory for gays to be included in a tent of bad behavior.
She appears interested in protecting gays and other outsiders from bad policy, she apparently could care less about outreach to the straights though, too bad there are so many of them and they vote.
But to participate in, sometimes even officiate over, authorize, or deny permission for a religious sacrament or a secularized Santa’s Christmas version to some people is still outside the purview of a secular state and for anyone celebrating being admitted to the OK-club just delays pressure for the abolition of a regime where the state decides which relationships are kosher, the apparatus of abuse is still very much in place.
If the people want to pass laws to recognizing the filing household incorporation papers for any group of people that is great for them and is within the secular interest of the whole people without excluding anyone.
Authorizing or licensing gay marriage, polygamy, Satanist group orgy clubs, even vanilla missionary style is not the business of a secular state, licensing was created to give legal framework for discrimination against mixed race marriage and it continues to be a tool to exclude some relationships while including others.
Sharia basically means making up the law as you go along. This is the difference between law in western countries and places like Saudi Arabia. In those places the laws are rarely documented. Judges base their decisions on precedent.
Marriage as a legal concept was “invented” quite a long time before the 1960s, you know. Or perhaps it is likely that you cling to these fantasy legal arguments because you do not want to know, reality does not serve your ideological purposes?
Sorry, didn’t think that I needed a sarcasm tag on the sarcastic bits. To be clear I agree the clerk wants to force her religious views onto her parish as public policy, no choice but to chuck her into jail for contempt, IMHO the judge should order her post forfeit and order a replacement sworn in; but her job and the law granting some people, and recently more people, the privilege to marry is wrong for everybody.
Marriage like any expression of harm-free religion or religious-cultural tradition is a human right not a privilege to be granted by the state.
A secular state has no business licensing who may and who may not marry(or get baptised, or convert religions, or be a communal leader and perform religious services, etc) at all, the common law concept of marriage is a leftover from state religion, kings, and divine mandates. The most that a country like the US should recognize is a civil contract with or without a ceremony, to give legal weight to someone’s personal religious/cultural relationship status is ridiculous. FWIW years ago I had a religious marriage ceremony, my new spouse went out and registered with the state after the fact without considering my wackadoo anti church-state theories, my sister only had a ceremony in the US when the state she was living in declared gay marriage legal, so she is more moderate than me.
Marriage licensing is a recent invention to prevent so called miscegenation, force public health checks, and reasons.
OK, so many people here are happy with locking up someone who isn’t a threat to anyone else. A prisoner due to her personal beliefs without trial because a judge says so.
But she is obviously a horrible person so locking her up makes people happy. We get to punish and hurt someone because they made people go to a different office to get a license. And that’s the harm she has caused. She made people drive further. But that’s not why she is locked up. She is locked up because she refuses to go against her own personal beliefs even though a judge told her to.
But to me, no matter how horrible a person she may be, I see a real problem with how this is being handled. Consider what could have happened if the Bush admin had gotten a couple of more supremes appointed and Texas decided to make the teaching of creationism as the primary theory for how life on earth began. Imagine that being fought at the supreme court and those judges saying Texas has the right to enforce this rule. Imagine a teacher deciding that they would not teach creationism in a science class and being ordered by a judge to do it anyway. She refuses and is locked up for contempt of court. She is imprisoned with no trial and no guilty verdict. She never agrees to teach religion and stays in jail… because she believes it is the right thing to do.
According to the philosophy of many here, her being in jail is justified because a judge told her to teach religion in science class and she refused.
The concept of contempt of court in a free society is disgusting IMO. It’s easy to cheer when it’s someone we don’t like and I suppose we just have to hold our noses and look the other way when it’s someone who we do like.
She’s in hot water with the law because she’s not fulfilling the sworn duties or her elected position. One of the duties of county clerk is administering marriage licenses. If your religious beliefs have you fearing the prospect of such a civic right being made equally available to homosexual couples, and you know in your heart that you would sooner uphold your personal beliefs than those of the State, then don’t run for county clerk.
She may be a prisoner of her personal beliefs, but not in the sense you’re arguing. There’s an easy way out of this, and it’s one that others like her, in her position, have taken: resign.
So, to compare, the teacher can go free if she consents to allow children to be indoctrinated with theology and creationism? Wouldn’t a person of of good conscious reject that proposal if they believed it would ultimately harm people?
Contempt of court is an ecclesiastical concept and in this case it’s being used to jail someone for upholding christian beliefs. Kinda ironic… I just don’t see how the religious argument that a courts power is derived from god and therefore contempt for the court is an offense for which your freedoms can be taken away without trial or a guilty verdict has any legitimate standing in a free and secular society.
Someone who is a lawyer/law student would be much more qualified to address your hypothetical scenario. As I see it— and I have very little knowledge of the contractual framework of the public education system —the teacher’s only course of action would be to resign and sue the district, assuming there is some legal precent (or lack thereof) favoring her case in this hypothetical future where the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled in favor of effectively imposing religious views via the State (a scenario which seems a bit implausible given the Establishment Clause).
Contempt of court, as I understand it, is used in mainly three scenarios: (1) refusal to comply with a court order, (2) dress or behavior disruptive to court proceedings, or (3) dress or behavior that defies the dignity of the court. Kim Davis falls squarely within the first scenario (though her hair puts her at risk of the third). The judge had the discretion to impose either a fine or jail time. In Davis’ case, he chose jail time because he suspected that any fine would be quickly paid from the many eager coffers within her religious community, thereby depriving the impose fine of any punitive effect.
