Kim Davis will spark a revolution against same-sex marriage, pundit claims

Illustrated rainbow pride flag on a white background.

The Chair of the anti-gay National Organisation for Marriage has claimed that Kentucky clerk Kim Davis will be the “spark” to ignite a revolution against equal marriage in the US.

Davis, the clerk for Rowan County, Kentucky, was jailed for contempt of court earlier this month after she repeatedly ignored direct court orders to block staff from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The clerk, who has been married four times, cited her Christian faith and belief in ‘traditional’ marriage as the reason she couldn’t let gays even marry once.

Since her release from jail, she has become a darling of the far-right anti-gay movement, with her lawyer Mat Staver condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for comparing her to ‘Jews in the gas chamber’.

However, John Eastman – the chair of anti-gay group NOM, which failed to stop same-sex marriage – has claimed that she will now spark a revolution.

He wrote in the National Review: “One can only hope that Ms Davis’s simple but determined act of civil disobedience will yet ignite the kind of reaction in the American people that is necessary to oppose such lawlessness, or at the very least bring forth a national leader who will take up the argument against judicial supremacy in truly Lincolnian fashion.”

Eastman appears to also throw out all concept of legal precedent, writing: “The Constitution requires that all officials, both federal and state, take an oath to ‘support this Constitution’, and the Constitution itself provides that ‘this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land’.

“Neither the oath clause nor the supremacy clause requires fealty to an erroneous decision of the Supreme Court that is contrary to the Constitution itself.

“That is not constitutionalism, or the rule of law, but the rule of judges; a claim that although the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution is whatever the judges say it is, even if what they say is a patently erroneous interpretation of the Constitution.”

In fact, the Supreme Court has already ruled that same-sex marriage is protected by the Constitution itself.