Many people were surprised when Rowan County, Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis was arrested in court and forthwith sent to jail without bail last Thursday after she persisted in her refusal to issue marriage license certificates to same-sex couples.
Her lawyer Matthew Staver wondered why the judge sent his client to jail without bail, noting that even murder suspects are allowed to post bail while their trials are pending.
"This woman hasn't done any crime at all. She's being held without bail for an indefinite period of time," Staver told News Max. "In fact, one of the US marshals when they were directed by the judge to take her into custody told her he had never arrested somebody who had not committed a crime."
Davis was sent to jail by US District Court Judge David Bunning, who explained that he did so without bail because Davis has a lot of supporters who are willing to shoulder the cost of bail.
Staver believes that Bunning did not even consider a fine at all, even though the gay couple who filed the original injunction against Davis requested that she be fined, and did not say anything about jail time.
But even though Davis has drawn a lot of supporters, she has also gained a lot of bashers, including Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who said that Davis has the option to get out of jail anytime she wants—but at a price.
"All she has to do is resign her job and say, 'Look, I can't do this in conscience. And because I can't do it in conscience, I really can't hold the job of being clerk.' That's the principled decision," he said.
But Staver insisted that resigning from her job is not an option for Davis. "She's not going to resign, she's not going to sacrifice her conscience, so she's doing what Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which is to pay the consequences for her decision," the lawyer said.
The current situation is something that Republican presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee cannot help but shake his head to, saying it's unfair how liberal Democrats break marriage laws but when Republican conservatives do it, they are thrown in jail with "no bail."
During ABC's "This Week," Huckabee cited the example of liberal Democrats such as former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome and President Barack Obama, whose administration specifically ignored federal marriage laws without punishment.
On the flip side, when Davis refused to sign a marriage certificate for a same-sex couple, she immediately lands in jail.
"You've got Democrats who ignored the law when it was the law to have traditional marriage," Huckabee said. "Gavin Newsome in San Francisco as mayor, performed same-sex weddings, even though it was illegal. Did he ever get put in jail? He most certainly did not."
