Since Kim Davis first refused to offer marriage licenses to same sex couples after same sex marriage became legal across the United States on June 26th 2015, a mini media storm has been brewing. Lauded by some as a protector of 'traditional' marriage, Davis--and as a result Rowan County Kentucky--has held her ground. Claiming that she is acting under "God's Authority", Davis has continued to violate federal law, and deny couples marriage licenses, for almost three months waiting for a ruling on whether or not she as an individual could be compelled to follow federal law.
As the case trickled forward, so too did her internet fame, breaking into a full fledged twitter storm in the last few weeks when a U.S. District Court Judge affirmed that yes, she did have to follow federal law as a federal employee. Davis continued to refuse. Within hours she hailed as a hero and hissed at as a villain. By today, whens he was held in contempt of court, the case had gone international. One person's bigotry had become the talk of the nation.
Then our attention shifted. Rather than discuss how and why Davis has been able to allow her bigotry to control a Kentucky County, or to have a national debate about what we can do to make sure elected officials follow the federal laws they are appointed and elected to serve, we have instead fixated on the fact that Kim Davis has been married four times. Oh, and she's 'fat'.
Yup. It's not enough for us that Davis holds bigoted views and that those bigoted views are hurting law-abiding Americans. It's not enough for us that Davis is contributing to a culture of hatred, or that her views are directly impacting American couples wanting to become American families. Nope. That's not important to the twitter feed. The twitter feed is joking about making Kim Davis halloween costumes out of large blue t-shirts.
And I just don't get it. Why does it matter what Kim Davis looks like or who she has married? We have some damn good reasons to criticize Kim Davis, and those reasons have nothing to do with whether or not her jeans have elastic in the waistband or which husband fathered her kids.
None of this matter.
And if Kim Davis were a 50 year old man with pepper-grey hair, a P90X workout habit that made Scott Walker sweat with envy, and a high-school girlfriend turned wife who stayed home and raised their two blond kids, it still wouldn't matter.
Because Kim Davis' personal life, looks and history aren't what matters. What matters is Davis' bigotry. And that bigotry exists all across the United States. It lives in trailer parks and 5th avenue penthouses, and when we fixate on Davis divorces, rather than on her views we reinforce the idea that only people we don't like, only people we can hate, only *other* people are bigoted.
We distance ourselves from Davis by holding her hypocrisy up to the world on a giant shiny banner, when we should be asking ourselves if we, like Davis, contribute to hate. We should be fixating on how on earth bigotry is allowed to stand in a government office, and what we can do fight it in whatever form it takes. Davis' personal life isn't the problem. And Davis' personal life isn't what should piss us off. The problem is that bigotry is alive and well in the 21st century in a myriad of forms, and that's what should piss us off.
We don't *NEED* to be angry at Davis' for her looks, and her clothes and her husbands. We have plenty to be angry about. She broke federal law in order to deny people civil rights. Who she is, how she looks and how she behaves doesn't matter. We don't need to hate Davis for any of that. It's enough that she was bigoted. We don't need another reason to criticize her, and when we look for one, we undermine the severity of what she did--she denied the humanity of the people she ostensibly serves. What Kim Davis has done in allowing her personal bigotry to continue to exist, and to impact her ability to serve effectively as an elected official is more than enough of a reason for us as a society to criticize her. When we refocus on the hypocrisy, her looks or her life, we lose out on what really matters. What really matters is that she let hate define her behavior, and that is unacceptable. 