A gay-rights group is giving Kim Davis, who refuses to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the same treatment as the Westboro Baptist Church. Over the weekend, Planting Peace, the organization that erected a rainbow-painted house across from the anti-gay church, put up a billboard in the Rowan County clerk’s hometown of Morehead, Kentucky. It reads, “Dear Kim Davis, the fact that you can’t sell your daughter for three goats and a cow means we’ve already redefined marriage.”
The ad cost $500 and is set to stay up for a month. Aaron Jackson, president of Planting Peace, said the billboard has a dual purpose: to “expose how the anti-LGBT movement is selective in what rules to follow and how they choose to define ‘traditional’ institutions or values,” and to tell LGBT youth, “You are loved, valued, supported, and beautiful. There is nothing wrong with you, and we will stand by you. You are not alone.”
Following her release from jail last week, Davis has been “thinking and praying very long and very hard about what she will do,” Harry Mihet, one of her attorneys, told CBS News. Deputy county clerks have been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Davis’s absence, and it’s unclear whether she’ll try to stop them when she returns to work on Monday. When he lifted Davis’s contempt-of-court charge last week, U.S. District Judge David Bunning said she must not “interfere in any way, directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.” The judge did not specify what consequences Davis will face if she violates his order.
Mihet said Davis respects the separation of church and state but thinks concessions should be made so she does not have to violate her beliefs in order to continue doing her job. He added that she “wants to treat everyone equally, however her conscience does not allow her to.”
