David Bunning: Last News

$100,000 in damages after a jury decided that the men were entitled to $50,000 each for being denied a marriage license by Davis after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state-level bans on same-sex nuptials across the nation in mid-2015.Ermold and Moore sued Davis after she declined to issue the couple a marriage license three separate times, and refused to permit her deputies to issue a license bearing her official name or title.She argued that allowing the license to be issued would violate “God’s definition of marriage” and her personal beliefs opposing homosexuality as an Apostolic Christian.During the fall of 2015, Bunning sentenced Davis to five days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to allow marriage licenses to be issued — not only to Ermold and Moore, but to several other couples, gay and straight — lest she be accused of discriminating against same-sex couples.Following her release, she agreed not to block her deputy clerks from issuing licenses that had been edited to remove her name and title — although both she and her deputy raised concerns about the validity of such licenses.In a tacit show of support for Davis, Kentucky lawmakers later passed a law to change rules that removed county clerks’ names from marriage licenses.