Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who became a conservative celebrity when she refused a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in 2015, recently traveled to Romania in an effort to support changing the country’s constitution to explicitly outlaw gay marriage.
The nine-day trip was organized by the Liberty Counsel, the same conservative Christian nonprofit group that represented her during her public stand against the marriage of same-sex couples in the United States two years ago.
According to the New York Times, Davis told a local news outlet that she sought to defend “the natural family” by advocating for a constitutional change. Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in Romanian law — the country’s constitution uses gender-neutral language, the Times said — but it is also not explicitly prohibited.
Davis told the Times: “I want to give Romanians hope that they can stand strong and they can stand for something without being against a group of people or whatever.”
She added: “You can be for something and not be against something else.”
“During their nine-day visit, Ms. Davis and Mr. Mihet are holding conferences in Romania’s largest cities, including Bucharest, Cluj, Sibiu, Timisoara and Iasi,” Liberty Counsel said in a statement on their website Tuesday.
Harry Mihet, who was born in Romania, is the group’s vice president for legal affairs.
The statement continues: “Their message is simple and based upon the recent lessons learned in the United States: same-sex ‘marriage’ and freedom of conscience are mutually exclusive, because those who promote the former have zero tolerance for the latter.”
According to the Times, Davis told the Romanian newspaper Adevarul that a change to the United States’ Constitution to outlaw gay marriage — which many conservatives have advocated — would have prevented her arrest.
“What I can safely say is that if the family was defined in the Constitution as a union between a man and a woman, I would not have spent six days in prison,” she said.
