While most of the Republican field has expressed varying degrees of support for jailed Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, none of them have been as crass about it as Mike Huckabee. Not only is Huckabee fronting a rally for Davis at the county jail where she’s being held, but he’s using Davis as a tool for fundraising.
The New Civil Rights Movement noticed that Huckabee is leading an “#ImWithKim Liberty Rally” at the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson on Tuesday. Davis was sent there on Thursday after federal judge David Bunning held her in contempt of court for flouting his order to end her charade and resume issuing marriage licenses. Among the other headliners are the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and the head of Davis’ legal team, Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver. Apparently there will also be speakers from the National Organization for Marriage and Concerned Women for America.
In order to garner support for Davis, Huckabee has started a petition hosted at the Website FreeKimDavis.com calling for President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Bunning to release Davis immediately. According to a post on his Facebook page, 100,000 people signed it by Sunday morning. But if you try to browse to that page, you end up going to a section of Huckabee’s Website. This looks no different from most petitions started by politicians on their campaign sites. In all likelihood, the signers will get on Huckabee’s email list, increasing his potential fundraising base.
There can only be one plausible conclusion that can be drawn from this gesture. By using Davis as a fundraising tool, Huckabee is effectively saying that it is perfectly acceptable for an elected official who opposes marriage equality to use straight couples as collateral damage. For those who don’t know, the most offensive part of the Davis opera buffa isn’t that she is on her fourth marriage while saying she wants to protect marriage equality. Not by a longshot. For more than two months, no one in Rowan County, gay or straight, could get a marriage license. She kept this up on the advice of Liberty Counsel, even after Bunning wadded up her arguments and threw them back at her. She’s let it be known that she’ll stop issuing marriage licenses if released–a course that could get her racked up on federal civil rights charges.
Davis has maintained all along that issuing a marriage license to an LGBT couple would be anathema to her as a devout Apostolic Pentecostal; to do so would be, as she put it, “a Heaven or Hell decision.” And yet, she told Bunning in July that she opted not to issue marriage licenses at all because–wait for it–she “didn’t want to discriminate against anyone.” To understand how patently absurd this is, imagine if a Hindu city official stopped granting permits for all restaurants in order to keep steakhouses and burger joints out of town. Suffice to say said official would be out of a job as soon as it were legally possible to fire him. It’s a safe bet that Huckabee would be demanding that such an official be fired, not using him as a fundraising tool.
Huckabee seriously expects us to believe that Davis should get a pass for behavior that would probably get a non-Christian fired or impeached. He doubled down on this line on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolos.” He argued that Davis was well within her rights to disobey the Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality because in his world. Why? According to Huckabee, once a court makes a ruling, “then it is incumbent on Congress to codify that into law and specify what it means.” This is just a rehash of an old far-right shibboleth that courts can’t make law. So by that logic, school officials can force kids to pray in school because Engel v. Vitale isn’t law. People who don’t believe in God can be shut out of office because Torcaso v. Watkins isn’t law. And on, and on.
Huckabee and most of Davis’ other supporters maintain that she is just another good Christian being oppressed by those evil, God-hating libruls–ignoring that Bunning is a Republican. After this, it’s only fair to wonder–who wants to oppress whom?
