Jamycheal Mitchell, a 24-year old mentally ill black man, was found dead in his jail cell. That is bad enough but what makes it even worse is that he had been held in jail for four months without bail after being “accused of stealing a bottle of Mountain Dew, a Snickers bar and a Zebra Cake worth a total of $5.” Four months in jail without bail for stealing $5 worth of merchandise? How can that be even possible?
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It looks like we have our answer as to what Rowan County clerk Kim Davis will do. She has decided to go all the way in defying the law. This morning she refused to issue marriage licenses to two same-sex couples even though she has exhausted all her legal appeals, all the way up to the US Supreme court.
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You may recall my post of a couple of months ago about how members of the Ohio congressional delegation were using legal maneuvers to prevent Alaska’s Mount McKinley being changed to Denali, its original Athabascan name, simply because president McKinley was from Ohio and even though he had never been to Alaska or had anything to do with the mountain.
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The saga of Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County in Kentucky, who has been fighting for Jesus by denying marriage licenses to all couples ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in June that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, has got weirder. (Her appeal for a stay of the district judge’s order to issue licenses is now before the Supreme Court.) It turns out that in February, she had issued a marriage license to a couple consisting of a transgender man and a woman.
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Now that we are in a mode of relentless one-upmanship in finding ways to keep these pesky furriners out at all costs, one-time favorite and now floundering Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker says that building a wall along the US-Canada border is a “legitimate issue we need to look at”.
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There is a provision in the tax code, inserted into the law without debate in 1954 by then senator Lyndon Johnson, that requires nonprofit institutions, if they want to preserve their tax-exempt status, to not engage in political campaigns or try to influence legislation. (I went into this in some detail back in 2012.) Some churches have chafed under this restriction and beginning in 2008 decided to challenge it and for the past few years they have engaged in what they call Pulpit Freedom Sunday, usually timed a month before the November elections, giving explicitly political sermons, telling people how to vote, and even following it up by sending tapes of their sermons to the IRS, daring them to revoke their tax-exempt status. So far, the IRS has declined to do so.
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As candidates strive to make headlines and gain attention, the Republican assault on undocumented immigrants is reaching ever-new lows with Chris Christie suggesting that if elected he would get the head of the package delivery service FedEx to figure out how to track the movements of all immigrants, both undocumented and documented, all the time, spurring mockery as to whether people would be barcoded and scanned as they went from place to place.
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Jimmy Kimmel imagines what a campaign commercial for Trump might look like based on what he has told us so far about his plans. And I have to admit that it captures Trump’s style accurately.
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So here’s an update on the seemingly never-ending saga in Kentucky where three of the 120 county clerks are refusing to issue licenses for people to get married because they oppose same-sex marriage. One of them, Kim Davis of Rowan County, was sued by four couples (opposite sex and same sex) who had been denied licenses and lost her case on August 12 in the federal District Court. But on August 19, the judge David Bunning temporarily stayed his order, saying “IT IS ORDERED that the Court’s temporary stay of its August 17, 2015 Order shall expire on August 31, 2015, absent an Order to the contrary by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.” [Boldface in original but my italics-MS]
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