MOREHEAD, Ky. — Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk who went to jail after refusing to issue marriage licenses, was not at work Wednesday and will not return until next week.
Liberty Counsel, the legal group that represents Ms. Davis, said she would return to her office at the courthouse here on Monday. One of her lawyers, Mathew D. Staver, said in an email that Ms. Davis, after spending five nights in jail, “needs some rest and time with the family.”
In a statement, Ms. Davis said she was reviewing “boxes of letters expressing support and prayers from people around the country.”
Her statement included only a glancing reference to the legal turmoil of recent months: “I love God, love people and love my work. I hope we will continue to respect these values and that America remains a place where all three can live in harmony.”Ms. Davis was jailed last Thursday after she continued to defy a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses. After the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June, Ms. Davis, an Apostolic Christian, cited her religious beliefs and stopped processing licenses for all couples. The policy prompted the court challenge that led to Ms. Davis’s jailing; after her confinement, Ms. Davis’s deputies began issuing licenses.
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On Tuesday, the Federal District Court judge who ordered Ms. Davis detained, David L. Bunning, said she could go free because her office was “fulfilling its obligation to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.” But he warned Ms. Davis not to interfere, “directly or indirectly, with the efforts of her deputy clerks to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.”
Mr. Staver has not said whether Ms. Davis, 49, a Democrat who was elected clerk last year, would comply with Judge Bunning’s order; instead, he told reporters that she would not “violate her conscience.”
On Wednesday morning, one of Ms. Davis’s deputy clerks, Brian Mason, said he was going to “continue business as usual” at least until she returned.
Less than an hour after the clerk’s office opened on Wednesday, two San Francisco men who had received a marriage license returned to submit the completed paperwork to Mr. Mason, who accepted it and shook hands with the couple.One of the men, Mark Shrayber, who said he worked for the website Jezebel, said he married his partner, Allen Corona, of about eight years on Tuesday. “We really were going to come down here anyway to get married, and then it became a story, too,” he said.
Later, Mr. Mason said he would continue to issue licenses, even if Ms. Davis ordered him to stop.
Some of Ms. Davis’s supporters gathered outside Rowan County’s courthouse on Wednesday, but they were outnumbered by police officers and journalists. One man, Ante Pavkovic, briefly stood in the clerk’s office and heckled Ms. Davis’s deputies; he held a sign reading: “Kim broke no laws. Fire the cowardly clerks that are lawbreakers.”
The commotion irked a longtime county resident who had come into the office to update his disabled parking permit.
“Good God almighty,” DeWayne Barnett said. “Why don’t you all cover something worthwhile?”
But Mr. Barnett acknowledged that the debate swirling around the clerk’s office had affected him. He would never again, he said, vote for Ms. Davis.
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