Fans of Kentucky county clerk/would-be martyr Kim Davis should keep an eye on their wallets, because not all of their allies are who they seem to be. An anonymous prankster purchased the seemingly pro-Davis URL freekimdavis.com, which directs visitors to donate to the LGBT-rights group Human Rights Campaign.
Davis was imprisoned on September 3 on the order of David L. Bunning of Federal District Court for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Bunning’s father Jim is a Hall of Fame pitcher and represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate as a Republican for many years. Earlier today, Bunning freed Davis on the grounds that he was satisfied that her office was “fulfilling its obligation to issue marriage licenses to all legally eligible couples.”
On Sept. 3, the same day Davis was incarcerated, some enterprising and devious person registered the domain freekimdavis.com and has directed it to the HRC donation page. Ordinarily this might not be that big a deal, but fundraising sites like GoFundMe don’t allow campaigns to raise money for people who are in prison, the move may have redirected donated funds more than would otherwise have been the case.
Once you get to the website—at least as of today—the user is immediately directed to http://www.marriageequality.org/, where relatively little attempt to deceive anybody occurs. The page claims to be for “marriage equality”—obviously—and a large banner in the middle of the page celebrates the June 26 ruling from the Supreme Court outlawing any restrictions on marriage based on sexual preference. For what it’s worth, the Marriage Equality page claims to have raised $13,335, as seen above. It’s impossible to state how much of that resulted from the misdirect, of course—probably not very much.
According to TPM, a fair bit of fun was had on Twitter by opponents of Kim Davis using the #freekimdavis hashtag immediately following her arrest.
A spokesperson at Human Rights Campaign today denied the organization’s involvement and emphasized that Human Rights Campaign had no connection to the domain.
Some conservative groups, such as the group “Liberty Counsel,” have falsely claimed on Twitter that Human Rights Campaign itself was responsible for the misdirection, as seen here:
via The Daily Dot