Anti-gay Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis spoke with ABC News about her decision not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, a decision that landed her in jail. Davis insisted that she is not a hypocrite, that she is not hateful, and that she is ready to go back to jail.
Said Davis, “I have never once spouted a word of hate. I have not been hateful. I’ve had people yelling, and screaming and cussin’ me.”
Addressing the issue of her “past” (she has had 4 husbands, plus adulterous affairs): “I haven’t always been a good person. When I didn’t live for God, I didn’t live for Him. And I was real good at living for the devil.” Asked if she is a hypocrite, she responded, “No, I’m forgiven. Washed clean.”
ABC News’ Paula Faris also asked Davis, “Who’s your boss?” Not surprisingly, she put little stock in the constitution: “My constituents elected me. But the main authority that rules my life is the Lord,” she said.
Davis went on to say that though she has “friends that are gay and lesbians” she can’t condone their living in sin: “I can’t put my name on a license that doesn’t represent what God ordained marriage to be.”
She remains seemingly unswayed by the backlash she has received:
“What people say about me does not define who I am. That’s everybody’s opinion and that’s everybody’s right,” Davis said.“I’ve been called things and names that I didn’t even say when I was in the world. Those names don’t hurt me,” Davis said. “What probably hurt me the worst is when someone tells me that my God does not love me or that my God is not happy with me, that I am a hypocrite of a Christian.”
Davis also took a swing at one gay man who remarked that he “finally felt human” after being granted a marriage license by the state:
“I don’t think dignity is guaranteed in the Constitution. I think dignity is something that you find within yourself,” Davis said. “I feel really sad that … someone could be so unhappy with themselves as a person that they did not feel dignified as a human being until they got a piece of paper. I mean, there’s just so much more to life than that.”
Never have Justice Kennedy’s words in his landmark majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges rung more true:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
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