Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Ky. clerk not sued for withholding marriage licenses now gives them only to opposite-sex couples

One of the Kentucky county clerks who stopped issuing marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage but didn't get sued has resumed issuing licenses, but only to opposite-sex couples.

Casey County Clerk Casey Davis told Larry Rowell of the Casey County News that he issued a marriage license to an opposite sex couple on Sept. 30.

"A Separate Baptist preacher, Davis said publicly numerous times after the ruling that based on his religious convictions that marriage is between a man and a woman, it precluded him from issuing a license to a same sex couple," writes Rowell, himself a Baptist minister. "And Davis said he still will not issue a license to a same sex couple. As to why he changed his position, Davis said he wants to serve opposite-sex couples."

“There’s a lot of hard decisions that come with being that (an elected official) and one of them is I wasn’t doing other people right by not issuing them licenses and when the governor and attorney general both came out and said a blank license is fine, give them the paper, it’s all right,” Davis told Rowell.

However, a spokesman for the attorney general's office told Rowell that the licenses issued from Davis’s office have not been altered.

Davis is no relation to Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis, who was jailed by a federal judge for refusing in a lawsuit to issue marriage licenses. Casey Davis and the other Kentucky clerk refusing to do issue licenses, Whitley County Clerk Kay Schwarz, have not been sued.

Casey "Davis also said that since Kim Davis had been sued by opposite-sex couples seeking licenses in Rowan County, he hoped to avoid that fate by reversing his position on opposite-sex couples," Rowell reports. He said a group of county clerks are “putting together a form hoping to satisfy both sides and one that the legislature will pass a bill that accommodates for both.”

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