Anti-Gay County Clerk Is Milking The Martyr Bit For Fun And Profit

Rowan County Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis
is enjoying her role of rubbing her
"religious" convictions in all of our faces.  

UPDATE: 

This dumb clerk said she would wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule all the lower courts that have in recent weeks ruled against her efforts to not issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court basically blew her off Monday, so now the ball is back in her court. She has vowed to go to jail rather than comply with court rulings.

The Martyr Complex again.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

A county clerk in Kentucky named Kim Davis is really milking her 15 minutes of fame, extending that 15 minutes longer and longer for the fun and profit of martyrdom.

Her schtick: Refusing to obey orders to marry same sex couples along with straight couples to comply with the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying there is a Constitutional right to gay marriage.   

True, not everybody likes that ruling, but if you're a sworn government official, you have to uphold the law.

Davis said God's law is more important, or at least her interpretation of it is. It goes against her religious beliefs to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.

Fair enough. If her religious beliefs bar her from issuing such marriage licenses, then she shouldn't. However, even though she considers God's law more important, she still has to comply with U.S. law.

The solution would be to resign as county clerk if her religious beliefs conflict with her job. Several clerks across the nation have taken that route. Those clerks, I support. I don't agree with their stance on gay marriage, but they took the honorable way out. They can't do their job because of their religious beliefs, so they found other jobs.

The clerks who resigned stayed honest and true to themselves. Can't argue with that.

I CAN argue with Davis. Courts have repeatedly ordered her to issue licenses, but she still won't.

(In a funny side note, Davis recently issued a marriage license to a straight couple. But what she didn't know was the male half of the couple is transgender. His birth certificate lists him as female, and Davis failed to check it. Ha Ha!!!)

Still, Davis is having her fun with her anti-gay lawyers.

As Michelangelo Signorile notes, Davis' intractability is a win/win. She gets to be part of the Conservative Martyr complex, in which you win notoriety and probably money for being "persecuted" by those "awful homo-fascists"

The right wing politicians win, too. Because if Davis ends up facing criminal charges or is forced out of her job as county clerk, they can point to the false notion that Christians are being persecuted in this country, religious liberty is under assault, yada yada yada.

Which is bullshit, of course.

Judge David L. Bunning of the U.S. District Court for Kentucky's Eastern District said this about Davis' religious rights:

"The state is not asking her to condone same sex unions on moral or religious grounds,  nor is it restricting her from engaging in a variety of religous activites. ....She is even free to believe that marriage is a union between one many and one woman, as many Americans do. However, her religious convictions cannot excuse her from performing the duties that she took an oath to perform as Rowan County clerk."

An editorial in the Lexington, Kentucky Herald-Leader said it best about Davis and her lawyers from the conservative Liberty Counsel:

"Liberty Counsel chairman Mat Staver continues to insist that elected public officials have a constitutional right to pick and choose which of their government duties they will perform based on their religious beliefs - in other words, that public officials can use religion to discriminate against certain citizens. 

Nothing could be more un-American. What he is advocating would destroy the rule of law, a foundation of our republic. And imagine the chaos, given the wide range of religious beliefs."

But Davis, the Liberty Counsel and their minions don't believe in America as it is. They want us to live in a theocracy, fashioned on their stilted, weird Biblical beliefs. They will not be happy unless everyone in the nation has the same religious beliefs that they do.

That means Davis and the Liberty Counsel really are un-American, as that Kentucky newspaper suggests.

However, most Christianists never take not for an answer, so Davis and the lawyers backing her will keep pestering us.

Sigh.

New Music: Awesome Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats

Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats  

NPR featured some really great musicians yesterday -- a band called Nathaniel Rateliff And The Night Sweats.

Yeah, strange name. And the music sounds like it was made in the early 1960s or earlier.

"I really wanted to try to mix that Southern soul sound with a little bit of honky-tonk, and what our Missouri roots are," Rateliff told NPR.

Let's watch a couple of their videos and hear their music.

First: Their hit "S.O.B".


Here's an even better new song by them, called "Howling At Nothing"

Driving While Black Means You Can't Look Away From Or At A White Cop

This man was pulled over in Dayton for making "direct
eye contact" with a white police officer he drove past.  

The incident I'm about to describe isn't as infuriating as the deaths of young black people at the hands of cops, but it's almost as bad.

A black man driving a car on a recent night was pulled over by a white cop. The excuse?

Well, initially, the cop said it's because the motorist, John Felton, didn't use his turn signal soon enough before making a right had turn.

Felton DID use the turn signal, but the officer said it was less than 100 feet before making the turn.

Who in the world gets pulled over for not using a turn signal soon enough? A lot of people don't use it at all.

But the infuriating part is that the officer later says that the real reason Felton was pulled over because he made "direct eye contact" with the officer as he drove past.

Never mind that cops usually get suspicious of people when they avoid eye contact - it's a sign of nervousness and a potential signal that they've done something wrong.

Felton was in Dayton Ohio. He's from Michigan and was visiting family.

Anyway, apparently, if you're driving while black and you notice a police officer, you're supposed to simultaneously look away from and look at the cop?

To be fair, the Dayton Police Department later said it is not proper for an officer to pull over a motorist simply for not making eye contact, notes the Huffington Post.

Felton agreed to meet with the officer who pulled him over in a meeting facilitated by the Dayton Mediation Center.

Let's hope this turns into a teachable moment for certain Dayton cops.

Here's the video of the incident:

Sinkhole Grabs People Minding Their Own Business At Bus Stop

These people aren't on as solid ground as they think. 

A bunch of people were milling around a bus stop in China this week, as people tend to do.

The problem is, the ground would have nothing to do with it.  In a dramtic video, we see a sinkhole open up beneath the crowd.

Five people were hurt, none seriously.

No word on what caused the sinkhole

Here's the video from a nearby security camera:

Now We Know Playbook: How Alabama Republicans Ensuring Minorities Don't Vote

Alabama is making it harder for residents to get
driver's licenses. Is it budget cuts or is it
an effort to prevent the poor and minorities from voting?  

So a bunch of states in recent years  have passed voter ID laws, in which voters have to have official photo IDs, usually a driver's license to vote.

This is to combat the imaginary epidemic of voter fraud going on across the country.

Since most of these voter ID laws were passed by Republican legislators or championed by Republican governors, the fraud might be efforts to make it more difficult for poorer people and minorites to vote.

The proof of this idea came from Alabama this week. Citing "budget cuts" Alabama plans to close 45 of its 49 Department of Motor Vehicles offices, says the Daily Kos.

Of course, nobody is blatantly saying that this is really an effort to prevent people from voting, but it has to be.

People can get voter photo IDs from county registrar offices in Alabama, too, but that also sometimes involves traveling pretty far distances. Which is hard if you don't have a car and driver's license, and there's not much in the way of public transportation.

Sure, Alabama has budget problems. A lot of states do.

But closing so many DMV offices in Alabama would force people to take an entire day, possibly two days off from work to travel long distances, wait in long lines, and then hopefully obtain a driver's license.

As Daily Kos points out, this will also encourage people to drive without a license. Which means people who really don't know how to drive will drive unsafe cars around Alabama. What could go wrong?

Sure, some people can renew drivers' licenses on line. But if there's a problem that has to be resolved, then it's an arduous day at the Alabama DMV.

Are Republican lawmakers in Alabama more concerned with balancing the budget? Or are they more concerned too many Democratic or Independent voters could force them out of office?

Hmmmm.

Trump Is Trumping Everything In An All Trump All The Time World

Donald Trump is clickbait and a media ratings winner.
So we get all Trump All The Time.  on

Last night, CNN was scheduled to air what I thought might be a pretty interesting program. Anderson Cooper, the network's flagship personality, was going to do a 10-year retrospective of Hurricane Katrina.

Cooper was going to check in on the people still trying to rebuild their lives, examine their struggles and their triumphs.

Nobody got to see it. The show was trumped by Donald Trump.

Yep, Donald Trump was holding a news conference, so CNN postponed Cooper's Katrina show until tonight. Unless of course Trump holds another news conference, in which case the Katrina piece will be postponed again. Possibly until the 20th anniversary of Katrina.

I know I'm contributing to the problem by writing this, but since when does Donald Trump become the main focus of everything?

Sure, he's clickbait and he's a ratings bonanza for the news networks. Everybody wants to see and hear the next stupid thing Trump says next, and wants to marvel at the mystery as to why so many people still want him to be president.

We get an endless loop. The networks and media correctly perceive their audience wants more of Trump. So they give it to them. And Trump delivers. So people want more. And we get more. On and on it goes.

I don't know when or how we'll manage to get off this Trump train. Will people finally, somehow get sick of him? Trump knows that he can only step up the game to hold the audience interest. He's a showman, after all.

Which is why he's been constantly flogging his distaste for Megyn Kelly long after anybody else would have just moved on. He'll say more outrageous things to keep the audience perked up.

Meanwhile, we're not hearing much from the other candidates, because they don't know how to play to an entertainment audience. They play to a political audience. Since it's all Trump all the time, none of us get a chance to know what else is going on.

Trump the entertainer trumps everything. Including Anderson Cooper's Hurricane Katrina report. All we get is breathless updates on Hurricane Donald.

I just hope we collective realize Trump is all bluster, no brains before he gets to a position of being dangerous, like President of the United States.

"Tiny Dancer" Insurance Ad Wins, Against All Odds

The best performance to "Tiny Dancer" ever
is in a John Lewis insurance commercial.

I always let out a groan of dismay when one of my favorite songs is co-opted and becomes part of a company's advertising campaign.

That groan came when I learned that John Lewis insurance is using the Elton John classic "Tiny Dancer" in one of its ads. It's one of Sir Elton's best songs, for sure. 

Then I saw the John Lewis insurance ad that featured "Tiny Dancer."

I'm sold. Maybe not on the insurance, but definitely the ad. 

It made me smile and will do the same for you. I love the girl in the ad. Well played, John Lewis.

Watch: