An alternative to sending Kim Davis to jail

If you're a judge trying to ensure compliance with the law, what can you do when someone like Kim Davis absolutely and publicly refuses to follow the law?

I'm not sure there's an alternative to 'showing them who's boss,' with 'boss' being the law, not the judge. I think it was correct to send Kim Davis to jail, and it was correct to release her once her office started issuing marriage licenses to all who qualified, including same-sex couples.

This article, however, suggests a very good alternative to jailing Ms. Davis:

Bunning could have simply ordered that, if Davis would not carry out her constitutional obligation to issue marriage licenses on an equal basis, she would be forbidden to issue marriage licenses at all. Under Kentucky law, the responsibility for issuing marriage licenses would then devolve onto Rowan County Judge/Executive Walter “Doc” Blevins, who had expressed willingness to issue the licenses on an equal basis. To ensure that Davis did not reap a windfall from that decision, Bunning could have ordered the county to withhold whatever portion of Davis’s salary was attributable to her marriage-license duties and to use that money to reimburse the judge/executive’s office.

Yes, that does sound a good solution.

Image: kentuckykindredgenealogy.com

The scope of conscience in same-sex marriage

Kim Davis, a protesting county clerk from Kentucky, is in jail today due to contempt of court. The Supreme Court ruled the same-sex couples have the same right to marry that opposite-sex couples do. Then the Supreme Court decided not to review Davis's suit that she should be exempt from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples due to her strongly held religious beliefs.

I'm a strong supporter of using your conscience on the job, though you don't always get to. You don't always get to do what feels right because the boss disagrees, or the company policy is X, or it's someone else's job to make that decision.

I don't remember ever having to do something that felt very wrong. And I've never had to deny services to someone who was sorely in need.

Denying services is exactly what Kim Davis wants to do, so she doesn't get my support. If she feels that she can't issue marriage licenses, she can quit her job. If she doesn't want to quit her job (and that feeling is even stronger than her stance against same-sex marriage), she can tell herself that she isn't performing the weddings or even supporting them, she is only do the bureaucratic work of asking the state's questions, filling in answers, and determining whether applicants meet the state requirements.

However, Kim Davis doesn't have the power or mandate to decide who can get married and who can't. She wasn't elected to be the judge of those issues, so she very much oversteps her mandate when she refuses to issue marriage licenses. She ought to decide whether she is going to be a county clerk or going to be an conscientious Christian during her work hours. She wants to be both, but that isn't her remit. She should stop being a spoiled brat insisting on both, grow up, and make up her mind.

Image: ifyouonlynews.com

Extras. Town vs. college in Davis's hometown. Interesting political landscape. More quotes, but not more insight in this article.