Jan. 2 (UPI) — Kim Davis, the former county clerk in Kentucky who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, faces more than $360,000 in payments related to a legal dispute over the issue.
U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning ordered Davis to pay $260,084 to the attorneys who represented David Ermold and David Moore in a marriage license dispute. That amount is on top of the $100,000 in damages a jury ruled in September she should pay to the couple.
Ermold and Moore sought a marriage license shortly after the 2015 Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court ruling granted same-sex couples the right to marry across the country.
Davis, who was Rowan County clerk at the time, refused based on her religious beliefs and ended up spending five days in jail for failing to comply with an order to issue marriage licenses.
Davis’s attorneys at the Liberty Counsel said they will appeal the ruling.
“[A)]judge’s improper action has teed up Kim’s case to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, where we intend not only to win religious accommodation for all Americans, but also to overturn the wrongfully decided Obergefell same-sex ‘marriage’ opinion,” Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said in a statement.
Bunning ruled in 2022 that Davis violated the civil rights of Ermold and Moore and another couple, James Yates and Will Smith.
Davis had claimed qualified immunity based on her religion, but Bunning ruled that such immunity would apply to a mistake, not knowingly violating the law.
“Ultimately, Davis ‘chose to stand for what [she] believe[s] in over what was contrary to that,’ — the law,” Bunning wrote in the ruling.
Subsequently, a jury awarded damages to Ermold and Moore, but a separate panel ruled against awarding damages to Yates and Smith.