Interesting timeline

I had been telling people that Kim Davis' four (or three and a do-over) marriages and her obvious cheating on her first husband by getting pregnant by another man didn't count and shouldn't be used to label her a hypocrite. This was because she told us all that she became an Apostolic Christian only last year, so they all happened earlier.

But guess what?

Buzzfeed posted all four of Kim Davis's marriage licenses and here's a funny detail: her first three marriages—the ones that she entered into before she was a Christian (according to The Federalist)—all took place in Baptist churches and were all officiated by Baptist ministers. Let's quickly rattle off their names: Rev. Owen Cox, Rev. H.G. Pratt, Rev. Gary Clark. Only Davis's fourth marriage—the one Davis entered into after she become a[n Apostolic] Christian—was officiated by a judge (Jim Nickell), not a minister. 

Kim Davis isn't a Baptist anymore—she converted to Apostolic Christianity four years ago—but all three of her divorces, all of her adulterous acts, and all four of her marriages took place after she was a Christian.

(Note that her fourth marriage was to a man she'd been married to already.)

See, here's the thing. Jesus actually had something to say about that: in Luke 16:18 he gets really specific about it: Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced from her husband commits adultery. And sure it's "wife" not "husband", but women's agency is not a big thing in the Bible. It's just as bad for her as her three husbands.

Kim Davis by her own admission "recognizes that divorce is stringently prohibited in the Bible". Perhaps hers came when "she played in the Devil's playground for a long time and her life has been radically changed since then" but even though she's been "forgiven" for her divorces, they're still legal. And I'm sure that she's issued licenses to divorced people in the past, because there's no way for her to recognize them. Nor, as my sister pointed out, does Kim Davis apparently have any problem issuing marriage licenses to people who aren't Christian, who aren't getting married in church, who are adulterers, who aren't virgins, who are transgender (there's a documented case of her giving a trans man whose birth certificate still read Female a license to marry a woman) ... in fact, the only people she has a problem giving licenses to are gay.

And granted, her Church does teach that marriage is for "a man and woman" only. Of course, it also teaches that marriage is a "lifelong union" that is "ordained of God" and that those heterosexuals should be "of like mind, faith, and fellowship", so why Davis decides that those parts can be safely ignored can only be because she only cares about that one.

Now, it really doesn't matter in one way. She could be utterly true to that statement of faith (though I kind of doubt people would be supporting her if she wasn't granting licenses to Baptists who wanted to marry Presbyterians, or old So-and-So on his third wife) and it wouldn't be legal. But in another way it does.

She is a hypocrite as well as a lawbreaker.

Edit: I had originally included the paragraphs below, but I was mistaken about which "Apostolic Church" she belongs to. Hers doesn't eschew the taking of oaths.

Let's also take note of what the Apostolic Christian Church has to say about two points:

17. Governmental authority is respected and obeyed. Members serve in a non-combatant status in the military. Oaths are not taken, but truth is affirmed.


18. Marriage is a lifelong union ordained of God in which a man and a woman of like mind, faith, and fellowship are united in the Lord in Holy Matrimony.

So Kim Davis' carrying on about her "oath of office" ought to be a first warning that this isn't about her Apostolic Faith.