Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis took the stand yesterday to explain why she cannot issue marriage licenses.
Early on in Thursday’s hearing Davis, an Apostolic Christian, took the stand to argue why she shouldn’t be jailed. It was, her attorneys argued, a “factually impossible” order to follow.
Davis’s attorney Roger Gannam asked the clerk about the day she found God. Davis broke down in tears and faintly replied: “I did a lot of wicked things in my time.” When Gannam asked for her definition of marriage, she responded: “Marriage is a union between one man and one woman.”
Asked if she was capable of believing otherwise, Davis said: “No.”
This a severely disturbed, self-loathing person, and whatever self-esteem she possesses arises out of belonging to her church-club, out of having an Invisible Friend who loves her in spite of her wickedness. I suspect she feels unable to risk letting go of the self-respect lifeline that she gets from her church. For her, the fight is not political but existential — and, nothing personal gay folk, but it’s just too bad for you.
Not any of which excuses her ill behavior. I do think, though, that she is a more troubled and 3-dimensional person than the easy pejoratives suggest. And if we could know, I think we would find that she is typical of many, perhaps most, people who are not born into family piety but find it when they get older.
Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health — the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §51
Definitely, he was on to something.