'Conscience' Case: KY Clerk Appeals to High Court

A Kentucky clerk who's under fire for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses is appealing her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis asked the court to grant her "asylum for her conscience."

But she may not have much success because Justice Elena Kagan will decide if the high court will hear her appeal. Kagan is considered a liberal justice, and she endorsed gay marriage in this year's Supreme Court ruling.

Kagan even performed a gay wedding the year before she joined the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage across the nation.

Davis says being forced to authorize gay marriages violates her religious beliefs.

If the Supreme Court denies her case, the gay couples who sued Davis could ask a judge to hold her in contempt. She could then face hefty fines or jail time.

While they're appealing her case, Davis' lawyers have filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking that they delay a federal court's order for Davis to issue licenses until her appeal is finished.

Her attorney, Jonathan D. Christman, with the Christian law firm Liberty Counsel, says forcing Davis to abandon her Christian principles and issue same-sex marriage licenses in the interim could never be undone.

He compared it to forcing a person who objects to war into the battlefield, or forcing a person who opposes capital punishment to carry out an execution.

"That searing act of personal validation would forever, and irreversibly, echo in her conscience - and, if it happened, there is no absolution or correction that any earthly court can provide to rectify it," he wrote to the court.