Anti-gay Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis releases memoir
Proceeds from sale of book, which tells of encounters with "fist-pounding homosexual men," will benefit Liberty Counsel
The right-wing legal firm Liberty Counsel is raising money through the sale of a new memoir by its tried-and-true cash cow, anti-gay activist Kim Davis.
Davis, the controversial Rowan County Clerk, has released Under God’s Authority: The Kim Davis Story, a book co-authored by John Aman and Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, that attempts to cast Davis as a martyr for religious liberty.
The book costs $25 and can only be ordered online. Proceeds from the book will benefit Liberty Counsel, a spokesman for the organization told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Liberty represented Davis on a pro bono basis when she refused to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, and has continued to play a role in managing her public appearances since then. Recently, the organization arranged for Davis to travel abroad with its employees to campaign in favor of a gay marriage ban in Romania.
According to the Herald-Leader, the book will detail Davis’ experiences during her headline-generating stint in jail for violating a judge’s order to allow her subordinates to issue licenses to same-sex couples. At the time, Davis maintained that she did not want licenses going out to same-sex couples that included her name and title on the standard-issue certificate, even if she did not process the licenses herself.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision finding bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, Davis did not want to be forced to grant licenses to same-sex couples. So, rather than be accused of discrimination, Davis ceased issuing marriage licenses to any couple, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Davis ended up spending six days in jail for contempt of court for her refusal to issue licenses. Eventually, her subordinates in the clerk’s office acquiesced and agreed to issue the licenses in her stead. The following year, newly-elected Gov. Matt Bevin, who frequently invoked Davis’ jailing on the campaign trail, signed into law a bill that removed clerk’s names from marriage licenses.
“Kim chronicles her dramatic encounters with furious, fist-pounding, homosexual men and the hate mail that flooded her office,” a description of the book reads. “Kim takes you behind-the-scenes of the unlikely saga that took America by storm in 2015. She tells how God transformed her life in 2011, why she almost retired in 2014, and how she knew — six months before the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous 2015 same-sex ‘marriage’ opinion — she was headed for jail.”
Former Arkansas Governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, another politician that tried to capitalize on the Davis saga, wrote the forward for the book, which he endorses on the back cover.
“It’s a great read,” Huckabee writes. “But more than that, this remarkable story of what God did in Kim’s life gives me hope for our nation. I think it will give you hope, too.”
Bevin and Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, have also endorsed the book.
“Kim Davis is one tough lady,” Graham writes. “In a culture that demeans people who obediently follow Jesus, Kim Davis drew on His strength as she experienced — and endured — persecution from the culture, the court, and the crowds, and survived to tell about it all in her compelling book Under God’s Authority.”
The memoir is also likely to garner publicity — and perhaps even sympathy — for Davis, who is running for re-election in 2018. Shortly after being released from jail, Davis switched her party affiliation to Republican. She will face one of four Democratic challengers in November. One of those challengers is David Ermold, one of the men she denied a marriage license to in 2015.
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