Two weeks after she was released from jail on the condition that she not interfere with the issuing of marriage licenses, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis is still trying to prevent her office from issuing marriage licenses. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court judge David Bunning rejected a request from Davis’s legal team to throw out his previous order requiring her office to issue marriage licenses to all eligible couples, not just the four who sued her, while her case is pending. “It would essentially allow her to reinstate her ‘no marriage licenses’ policy during the pendency of the appeal and likely violate the constitutional right of eligible couples,” the judge wrote.
Mat Staver, Davis’s attorney, described the latest move as “a formality.” The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the request on a technicality because Davis’s lawyers hadn’t gone through Judge Bunning first, and now they plan to take their motion back to the appeals court.
While Davis was in jail, her deputies issued modified licenses without her name, job title, and county. Both sides have questioned the validity of those documents, and now the ACLU has asked Judge Bunning to order Davis to reissue those licenses, and penalize her again if she refuses to do so. That request is still pending.
