A new legal cloud over same-sex marriage in Kentucky?

[Draggingtree]

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By Lyle Denniston on Sep 3, 2015 at 9:49 pm

Five deputy county clerks in Rowan County, Kentucky — the scene of the first major courthouse battle over a conflict between the Supreme Court’s view on same-sex marriage and religious objections to it — told a federal judge that they will start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Friday morning. They did so after the judge sent the county clerk herself to jail for contempt of court, and threatened her deputies with the same fate.

 

But even the judge conceded that those licenses, if issued, may not be valid, although he refused to decide that issue and left it to the lawyers for the same-sex couples to confront. The question of legality of new licenses came up during a series of hearings throughout the day Thursday in U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning’s court in Ashland, but did not get resolved and will linger.

 

With County Clerk Kim Davis in jail, under the judge’s order that she had illegally broken his order to end her “no marriage licenses” policy as a way of obeying her religious views against same-sex marriage, the dispute will be moving forward on several points and could return to the Supreme Court on at least some aspects. Her lawyers said they will be appealing her contempt punishment, and they have two other appeals pending in lower courts.