Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed after refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, says she’s been called Hitler and worse over her anti-gay marriage stance.
“I’ve been called Hitler, I’ve been called [a] hypocrite, I’ve been called a homophobe,” Davis told ABC News’ Paula Faris in an interview set to air Tuesday on Good Morning America.
“What people say about me does not define who I am. That’s everybody’s opinion and that’s everybody’s right,” Davis said.
An elected Rowan County clerk in Moorhead, Ky., Davis spent nearly a week in jail earlier this month after she declined to issue marriage licenses to gay couples despite a judge’s order, following a Supreme Court decision that legalized same sex marriage throughout the U.S. She said she has since been the target of verbal attacks.
“I’ve been called things and names that I didn’t even say when I was in the world. Those names don’t hurt me,” she said. “What probably hurt me the worst is when someone tells me that my God does not love me or that my God is not happy with me, that I am a hypocrite of a Christian.”
Davis appeared for her interview alongside her attorney, Matthew Staver. She has returned to work but has filed appeals in court to delay in an effort to delay enforcement of a judge’s order that she issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing gay couples seeking marriage licenses in Rowan County, accused Davis of altering licenses issued by her office in an effort to undermine their validity, by, for example, removing her name or the county name from the document. In her interview with ABC News, Davis confirmed that she did not consider the marriage licenses issued in her absence to be legal.
“They’re not valid in God’s eyes, for one,” she said.
[ABC News]
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