2y ago

Kim Davis must pay $260,000 legal fees over same-sex marriage license refusal

www.theguardian.com

Kim Davis, the former county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses in Kentucky to same-sex couples, must pay a total of $260,104 in fees and expenses to attorneys who represented one couple, according to a federal judge’s ruling.

That is in addition to $100,000 in damages a jury said the former Rowan county clerk should pay the couple who sued.

...

Davis drew international attention when she was briefly jailed in 2015 over her refusal despite the US supreme court’s legalization of same-sex marriage. She based her refusal on her belief that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

89 comments

Good. Your religion does not control how a government functions. You want to live in a theocracy? Go live in Vatican City or one of the more authoritarian Islamic countries. If you live in the US the policy is what the government, not your God, make it.
- Unfortunately if this goes to supreme court, she'll get away Scott free. USA is becoming a theocracy, celebrating Christian doctrine as if it was Sharia law in a muslim country.
  
  Becoming? Always has been.
  This is just an Extinction Burst.
  
  Hey bucko, here in JesusLand, ya'll best stay on the right side of God and his Holy Ya'll Qaeda militias, otherwise the Gays might cause another Hurricane!
  
  I don't see the court upholding wilful defiance of their own rulings.
  
  I do think there’s a chance it won’t. There’s a strong understanding of the fact that religion can prohibit you from certain jobs due to their requirements and it would be a catastrophic issue to brush past. It could wind up with the military feeling forced to take a bunch of pacifists and respecting their refusal to aid war efforts.
- A friend of mine pointed out she could have probably just claimed to have to go to the bathroom each time a gay couple arrived in that super conservative rural area and let someone else deal with it. Keeping her cough...morals....cough intact with no one being the wiser.
  
  All she had to do was let someone else in her office issue the certificates. But like all religious bigots, she didn't understand that
  The first amendment's guarantee of religious freedom protects citizens from the government. If you are a government employee, you are what the first amendment protects citizens from.
  She was wrongfully enforcing her own religious beliefs on her assistants. Kentucky (at the time) required county clerks to sign all marriage certificates, or the clerk's assistants could sign their name instead. Davis could literally have refused to sign every "gay" marriage cert that came in to the Rowan county office, but as long as someone in the office signed it there wouldn't have been a problem. However, she forbade any of her assistants from signing the certs because she considered the mere act of stamping her name on one to be exactly the same as her personally endorsing "gay" marriage. So even if her assistants had no religious objections to "gay" marriage they were prevented from doing their jobs because of her religious beliefs.
  So bigot gets what bigot deserves. The only tragedy to this story is that Matt Staver gets to fuck off with no consequences.
Oh no! Not the consequences of my own actions!
Never thought I'd hear that asshole's name again. But I'm glad this is the way I heard it. Bigots getting what they deserve always puts a smile on my face.
- I wondered how many times she has proclaimed "Go woke. Go broke."
  I hope her check clears.
  
  It won’t.
- Sadly, she’s not going to pay a dime of that.
- It’s nice that enough times passed that I got her mixed up with gay cake lady.!
Thoughts and prayers
Eff yeah! EAT S*$% you hateful monster!
A little good news goes a long way these days, when there's so little of it. TY OP for the post.
But why? All she did was deny a sanctioned government service to an entire class of people. /s
Unfortunately I'm sure she'll turn this into another fundraiser paid for by her fellow Christian fundamentalists.
- Unfortunately I'm sure she'll turn this into another fundraiser paid for by her fellow Christian fundamentalists.
  She already turned it into a lucrative career on the fascist misinformation circuit days after she first made national news, raking in probably millions of dollars since then.
  And yeah, I'm sure you're right that this will serve as an additional income booster for her 😮‍💨
- I actually was doing the math on this kind of thing lately, but it was RE: Alex Jones/Sandy Hook.
  So, the average US lifespan is about 77.
  So a court case taking 10 years is about 1/10th of your entire life.
  Now, consider that the beginning of your life (say up to 13 or so) you're not really in any mental position to be able to bring a court case. At the end of your life (similarly probably the last 15 years or so), you're in a similar position, where your body and mind may be failing and you may not be in a position to bring a court case.
  So if we cut off the "unusable in court" years of our lives, we're left with about 50 years of good quality "living" as an adult.
  That means a court case taking 10 years is actually closer to 1/5th of your entire life.
  How is a life where a large portion of it was fighting in court just to get a bare minimum of what is passing for justice a quality life?
  Do people not understand the passage of time and these are literally lives being wasted fighting for justice from fucking idiots?
  I understand the whole "court moves slow" but god damn there's got to be a better fucking system than making people wait out giant chunks of their lives for a pathetic half-ass result that isn't anywhere close to "justice."
  It's a fucking travesty that anyone defends it. It's a broken ass system, stop acting like we can fix something that places such little value of the time spent on such things in a persons life.
  Seriously if I had spent that many years trying to claw back justice from a fuckwit like this or Alex Jones, I would not look back and think I had had a chance to have a "life well lived." No, the "justice" system took that from me by taking its sweet fucking time.
  
  Justice delayed is justice denied.
  
  I'm not sure I follow your point. Do you think people actually do nothing but sit in court for hours every day while a case goes through multiple appeals?
- It's almost like the conservative court strategy is to appeal, delay, and hope you die before you face any consequences.
  
  It's almost like the "justice" system was organized like that on purpose because a lot of the people who helped write the constitution didn't want the aristocracy to go anywhere, or to have to face consequences, so they wrote a shitty constitution that still generally protected everyone in a position of power from ever having to answer to "a fucking plebeian."
  Gee, I wonder why the justice system is boiled down to "Whoever has the most money can just fucking wait out the other guy to win."
  
  Oh same thing I am doing with my student loan debt.
  If I make it to death it means I win.
- I mean, the legal system usually does. There's been a bit of a shit fight as to who should pay, the state or Kim. Might boggle your mind more to know that she still had the position up until 2019...
- that's a feature. it lets the powerful fuck over the powerless without consequence because the powerless can't afford to take a decade of their lives off fighting in court.
So scared of islam yet so happy to implement sharia
- Talibangelicals don't hate Islam because of some Crusader-Era kink. They just don't like Arabs, Persians, and other shades of Brown Person. Reverend Wright ate all the same shit, despite being at least as Protestant as the last ten Presidents.
  There's actually some speculation as to whether the modern day Joe Rogan / Andrew Tate conservatives are tacking towards Islam. Certainly, with all the free money the Saudis and Qatars are pumping into western broadcast athletics (golf, MMA, even e-Sports) I wouldn't be surprised to see more high profile Muslims stepping into the same role that guys like Hakeem Olajuwon and Muhammad Ali once filled.
  In another generation, our Ben Shapiros and Steven Crowders could very well be replaced by Jordan B. Peterson in a skull cap.
Yeah, sure, she'll take that out of her -$26,100 net worth and get right on paying that back.
- I thought she rode the MAGA grifter wave for a while. I'm sure she pissed away all her grift money already, but maybe she actually has some assets left from the hate train.
- She should setup a GoFundMe and ~~fleece~~ ask other bigots for the money. let them eat each other.
- You're not wrong, although I do wish that in situations like these, where the guilty party knew what they were doing was wrong but did it anyway based on their own personal beliefs, that the debts incurred would be as persistent as their beliefs.
Glad she's finding out, but she can probs fundraise her way out of that in a few hours via the right-wing griftiverse. There's no amount of money that hate-filled right wing grannies won't give to assholes that they think will stick it to the libs.
- Man I'd love to have a way to get the right-wingers to just give me money without compromising my morals.
  
  There's way too many people who don't share your moral fortitude. The reason why moral people don't do it, though, is because it amplifies and confirms these assholes' fears and prejudices.
- i was thinking the fundraiser could put her well into the profit zone
  
  Absolutely agree
  
  Congrats, you have reinvented the guiding premise of today's republican party
I am curious if she's been married, again, and divorced, again, since 2015.
- Apparently not, still on the fourth one to the second husband.
  Honestly this is the kicker for me
  Shortly after the same-sex marriage license controversy, Davis said she and her husband switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.
  At least they recognized their true nature.
  
  I wonder if it was like a scene from a Spiderman movie where they have conversations with their dark side in the mirror
- Everyone likes to point out that she was divorced a lot, but can you blame her? She probably had dudes beating down her door to go out with her.
  What guy doesn’t want to hook up with an angry clerk with a pompadour and baggy overalls. She’s got that “you’re in the wrong line” DMV hotness that everyone fantasizes about.
They'll never see it.
I bet they could repo her trailer and take all her shit and they still wouldn't get more than $26,000.
- I feel like lawyers in a high profile case will make sure every single penny is squeezed out of her until she dies
  At least I hope so.
- She'll raise more in donations from this than the fees and end up turning a profit.
- That's still a bit of a win then. Better to completely drain one of these monsters than a 250k slap on the wrist for wealthy scumbags like trump.
I'm glad this is the ruling. ...even if I know there will be a GoFund to pay this off, and she'll probably be running for Congress in no time on the platform of "Elect me to legitimize our homophobia."
- Every dollar going to her is a dollar not going to some other hate cause.
- It would be a shame if GoFundMe was breached and everyone could see who donated to her. Maybe all of those people would suffer consequences for being huge assholes, too.
  
  I don't think they'd care. In France the right fundraised a fucking million euros for a cop who shot a kid during a traffic stop, and they bragged about it.
  
  Being a huge asshole has become completely acceptable though unfortunately.
- I hope they stick her on a really boring committee, like salt mining regulations, until she slowly goes insane.
- See this is what I'm legitimately curious about. Was she able to turn her grandstanding into a lucrative side-gig of being a political speaker or author? It appears people in a position to make national news for the christo-fascist right have potential millions to be made by just playing their cards right. I imagine if she started a podcast around when she made national news, she could have gained a strong enough following to be well into a lucrative career doing speaking engagements, and could probably even push into a television show on a religious or political network.
Can someone tell me why a clerk is an elected position?
- My best guess is to keep the same people in that position rather than just anyone.
- Generally, states where County Clerk is an elected position are states where county-level government is particularly important and powerful. For example, the Clerk might be in charge of elections or determining property values for tax assessment.
- Its an administrative position in the municipal bureaucracy. Not totally outlandish to have an election to fill it. In this particular case, she's made a small fortune in campaign donations by doing a pouty face for the national news every time she's caught violating the oath she took to assume the job.
God work in mysterious ways!
$360,000 coulda bought a shit-ton of denim dresses and white tennis shoes.
Where is your Huckabee now, dipshit?
it warms my heart that, eight years later, she’s still feeling a very expensive sting from her absolute and unwavering cuntery.
Step 2 find out
You shouldn't judge people by their looks, but I have to admit I'd be a little scared to meet her in person.
- I am pretty sure she was my 5th grade math teacher. The only one who still wrote your name on the board if you were bad.
What a shame.
SCotUS will rule that Christians are exempt from the law under the first amendment because being forced to obey the law is tantamount to being forced to agree with the law, which is compelled speech.
- We should start mailing bound sacks with money signs on them to Thomas, a note on it telling him how we want him to vote. Might as well be honest about the situation. Fill the bags with glitter.
- who was? not kim davis.
In other countries, the losing party almost always pays - the US is somewhat unique in that paying is the exception, not the rule. However, the real crime here is that lawyers charged $260,000 to pursue this case.
- For a near decade long court case she's paying only about $28,800 per year of legal fees, which suggests not that many hours of lawyer's time being spent on it
  
  Fair point, I didn't realise it had been going on for so long. That in itself is an issue, though I imagine it's an issue Kim Davis is responsible for.
I hate to see someone punished over something they have no control over, like being a terrible human being.

89 comments