Kim Davis, the Rowan County Clerk of Courts, speaks to coworkers at the County Clerks Office on September 2, 2015 in Morehead, Kentucky. Citing a sincere religious objection, Davis, an Apostolic Christian, has refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling.
Kim Davis is still losing. The former Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples nearly a decade ago just got another legal smackdown—this time from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled unanimously against her.
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In a Thursday decision, the court rejected Davis’s desperate attempts to shield herself with religious liberty claims and qualified immunity, affirming a jury’s decision that awarded damages to David Ermold and David Moore, the couple she repeatedly turned away in Rowan County. The message from the court was clear: Davis’s personal beliefs do not give her the right to defy the Constitution.
Related: Kim Davis is back in court because she doesn’t want to pay a gay couple
According to the ruling, Davis wielded the authority of the state to violate the constitutional rights of citizens.
Judge Helene White wrote in the opinion, “When an official’s discharge of her duties according to her conscience violates the constitutional rights of citizens, the Constitution must win out. The Bill of Rights would serve little purpose if it could be freely ignored whenever an official’s conscience so dictates.”
She added, “Her conscience must yield to the Constitution.”
Davis, who once sat in a Kentucky jail rather than do her job, became a martyr for the far-right, gaining the backing of conservative groups like Liberty Counsel. But while she continues to claim victimhood, the courts have repeatedly made one thing clear: public officials cannot cherry-pick which rights they choose to uphold.
Ermold and Moore, who had been together for nearly 20 years when they tried to obtain a marriage license in Rowan County, were denied not once, not twice, but three times. Each time, Davis insisted that issuing the license would violate her religious beliefs—never mind the U.S. Supreme Court’sObergefell v. Hodges decision, which made it abundantly clear that same-sex couples have the same constitutional right to marry as anyone else.
Related: Kim Davis is trying to get marriage equality overturned by the Supreme Court
The jury agreed that Davis’s actions caused real harm, awarding each plaintiff $50,000 in damages. The couple testified that being turned away made them feel “subhuman” and “humiliated.”
Even with this latest ruling against her, Davis isn’t backing down. Liberty Counsel, the legal group representing her, has signaled plans to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in yet another attempt to overturn Obergefell.
The case was a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ rights, cementing marriage equality as the law of the land. The 2015 Supreme Court decision ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses, striking down state bans that had long denied LGBTQ+ couples the legal recognition and protections of marriage.
Davis, however, refused to comply. Instead of following the law, she shut down all marriage licensing operations in her office, forcing same-sex couples to seek services outside their home county. That defiance led to lawsuits, jail time, and a years-long legal battle that has now ended, once again, in a decisive loss for Davis.
“I have no doubt that Obergefell will be overturned,” Liberty Counsel’s Mathew Staver declared in February.
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