Tennessee Pastors Target Marriage Equality

Anti-gay fringe right religious hardliners in Tennessee have now gone after marriage equality in that state, saying that the state's constitution does not support marriage for same-sex couples – despite the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court finding that gay and lesbian couples have just as much legal right to marry as do mixed-gender couples, a finding that supersedes all state-level legislation, including state constitutions.

Fox 17 Nashville reports that "Eleven Christian ministers and the Tennessee Independent Baptists for Religious Liberty" have "filed a Declaratory Order with the Tennessee Department of Health" as of Dec. 26 that seems to attempt an argument that pastors are being denied their rights of religious freedom. The Declaratory Order posits that the "state's definition of marriage implicates the civil rights of the ministers in regard to the liberty of conscience guaranteed to them under the Tennessee Constitution and in regard to the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment promise not to prohibit the free exercise of religion and its prohibition on government-compelled speech."

The argument did not shy away from an overtly theocratic tone, adopting the line of reasoning that "the differences between male and female are integral to a true conception of one's self as male or female" and going on to assert that "God... defined the marital relation as one that can truly exist only between a biological male and female," the Fox News article reported.

There is more to marriage than the spiritual blessing of a church or cleric, of course; in essence, civil marriage is a legal contract, and religious rites are not necessary to make a marriage legally valid and binding.

But the religious group went after legal marriage in Tennessee all the same, asserting that when marriage certificates were adapted to meet legal requirements after the 2015 ruling, they were done so with no directive from the state constitution and no specific court directive to do so. The group seeks the invalidation – which is to say, forcible dissolution – of all same-sex marriages in Tennessee based on those arguments.

The Tennessee Department of Health declined to comment.