Law and Order in our One Nation Under God.

We can do this the easy way,
or we can do this the hard way,
but we're not going to do this yesterday's way, any more...

A county clerk in Kentucky who has invoked "God's authority" and is defying the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to license same-sex marriage has been summoned along with her entire staff to explain to a federal judge why she should not face stiff fines or jail time.

U.S. District Judge David Bunning moved swiftly Tuesday after a lesbian couple asked him to find Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis in contempt. Davis told several couples and a crowd of supporters and protesters that her religious beliefs prevent her from sanctioning gay marriage, and then retreated again, closing her office door and blinds to the raucous scene outside.

 The law is the law is the law is the law.
(apologies to Gertrude Stein, but... the world IS round!  No matter what they tell you...  I thought the Court's ruling was supposed to put all this stuff to bed?)

Lawyers for the two gay couples who originally sued her asked the judge Tuesday to find her in contempt, but punish her with only financial penalties, not jail time.

"Since Defendant Davis continues to collect compensation from the Commonwealth for duties she fails to perform," they asked Bunning to "impose financial penalties sufficiently serious and increasingly onerous" to compel her immediate compliance without delay.

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ADDED:
Now  that's what I'm talking about!

One of Ms. Davis’s sympathetic co-clerks, Casey Davis, claimed that this is not about preventing same-sex marriage. “We’ve only tried to exercise our First Amendment rights,” he said.

Well, no.

To quote Justice Antonin Scalia in a recent case involving another First Amendment claim of religious freedom, “This is really easy.”

In short, Ms. Davis has no right, constitutional or otherwise, to refuse to do the job Kentucky pays her to do. As a municipal official, she is required to issue marriage licenses to anyone who may legally get married. Since June 26, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution forbids states to ban same-sex marriage, that population includes April Miller, Karen Roberts, David Ermold and David Moore — the two couples she rebuffed on Tuesday.

The Davises don’t seem to understand the two-sided game they’re playing, appealing to the Constitution even as they violate it. Perhaps they forgot that the First Amendment protects the people from the government, not the other way around.
...
No one is telling Ms. Davis what she may or may not believe, or how to live her own life in accord with the dictates of her conscience and her God. What they are saying is that as an employee and representative of the government, she lives under the law, not above it.

ADDED:
Conservative law professor Jonathan Adler too, echoes Justice Scalia's words and the NYT editorial from yesterday: 

The law on this point is clear. Davis cites her religious conscience as the excuse for her intransigence, but she is wrong to do so.  That’s not only my view, but the view of no less than Justice Antonin Scalia.

Davis has a right to observe and adhere to her religious beliefs, but she does not have a right to her job as county clerk. The latter obligates her to follow federal law, including the applicable judgments of federal courts, and it is now the law of the land that the Constitution bars state governments from refusing to recognize same-sex marriages on equal terms with opposite-sex marriages. If, as Davis claims, her religious convictions bar her from issuing such a marriage license, she should resign.
 
Now Scalia has not, to my knowledge, said anything directly about Davis’s actions, but he has addressed the question of what public officials should do when their official obligations conflict with their religious conscience. Writing in “First Things” in 2002, Scalia explained that if he were to conclude that the death penalty is fundamentally immoral, he should no longer serve on the bench.
...
Davis is in a similar position. Her official position obligates her to take part in the state’s licensing and recognition of marriages. Insofar as the state’s definition of an acceptable marriage differs from her own, Davis is obligated to follow the state’s rule so long as she maintains her current office.
 
Think of it this way. Someone who objects to war due to his religious conscience has a right to be a conscientious objector and not serve in the military, even were there to be a draft. But he does not have the right to serve as a military officer, draw a paycheck from the military and then substitute his own personal views of when war is justified for that of the government. The same applies here.