There is no good reason whatever for Rowan County clerk Kim Davis’ ongoing refusal to issue marriage licenses, but some digging by U.S. News & World Report has turned-up some history that points toward a possible explanation of her toxic religiosity.
The Kentucky county clerk facing potentially stiff penalties for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses has been married four times, raising questions of hypocrisy and selective application of the Bible to her life.
The marriages are documented in court records obtained by U.S. News, which show that Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis divorced three times, first in 1994, then 2006 and again in 2008.
She gave birth to twins five months after divorcing her first husband. They were fathered by her third husband but adopted by her second. Davis worked at the clerk’s office at the time of each divorce and has since remarried.
It doesn’t need much imagination to understand how that string of bad marriages and relationships, and the complicated paternity of her children, might have had a debilitating effect upon her judgment, her self-esteem, her sense of self and worth.
And then she encounters a predatory cult that targets the insecure and the damaged, and fastens on to it like a lamprey — because her ‘church family’ and the love of an Invisible Friend are all that she has.
Maybe that’s how it happened, and maybe not; obviously, I speculate. It’s a familiar progression, however.
None of this excuses her failure to obey the law, or to rise above her own peculiar history, but to my mind it makes her a more sympathetic figure and, perhaps, just another casualty of Christianity’s degrading ideas.