Calling laws against same-sex marriage the last vestige of widespread discrimination in America, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway told TIME on Tuesday he refused to continue defending his state’s ban on gay marriage because he feared he’d regret it for the rest of his life. “I know where history is going on this,” he said. “I know what was in my heart.” “From a legal standpoint I draw the line at discrimination,” Conway said in an extensive interview shortly after he announced that he would not appeal a judge’s order that Kentucky recognize same-sex marriages. “If you think about it, in the long arc of history of this country, at one time we discriminated against women, at one time we discriminated against African Americans and people of color, we discriminated against those with disabilities.” “Where we are as a country now, this really seems to be the only minority group that a significant portion of our society thinks it’s still O.K. to discriminate against.” Conway said he grappled for weeks with how to respond to U.S. District Judge John G. Heyburn’s Feb. 12 ruling, which was the first in the South to strike down a state law banning gay marriage. Kentucky’s ban was passed by voters in 2004 and remains popular in the state. “I came to the conclusion late last month I couldn’t choose a mixed path. There were plenty of people who advised me this is very risky for me politically. But I talked it over with my wife, and she said, ‘You know what Jack, you really stink when you are insincere.'” A Catholic and a Democrat considering running for governor in 2015, Conway said he knew the decision could put him at odds with voters and with church leaders in his hometown. His thinking was shaped partly by statements from Pope Francis that encouraged openness toward gays. “Our new Pope recently said on an airplane, ‘Who am I to judge?’ The new Pope has said a lot of things that Catholics like me really like. I have, as![]()
