Bill Allowing Broad Discrimination Against Married Same-Sex Couples Passes Tennessee House
Amid a renewed conservative push to roll back marriage equality, a bill allowing businesses & individuals to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages just passed a legislative chamber.
Earlier today, the Tennessee House passed HB 1473, a bill allowing “private citizens and organizations” to refuse to “recognize a marriage between individuals of the same sex.” The vote wasn’t close, either: it passed 68–24, with no Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. The bill now heads to the Senate, where Republicans have an even larger supermajority.
The first bill of its kind to pass a legislative chamber, HB 1473 represents the most significant legislative attack against same-sex marriage in over a decade. Under the bill, businesses and individuals would be able to ignore same-sex couples’ legally issued marriage licenses, and this can have massive consequences.
For example, because employers are not legally compelled to provide insurance coverage to employees’ spouses, smaller employers that are not bound by federal discrimination protections may attempt to limit these benefits to those that are “married”—a term they can then define as excluding same-sex couples. Moreover, many religious hospitals would be able to deny visitation rights to same-sex spouses. Additionally, in virtually any setting, conservative individuals would be empowered to refuse to treat same-sex couples as being married, which can have large emotional and social repercussions.
On top of all this, similar to a rule implemented in Texas last year, HB 1473 would also make it so that elected judges are able to refuse to publicly perform same-sex marriages.
This isn’t new: ever since the 2015 ruling that legalized marriage equality nationwide, conservatives have had to search for new ways to limit LGBTQ+ rights. A lot of these attacks have focused on trans people: bathroom laws, gender-affirming care bans, and restrictions on identity documents have pretty much become the norm in Republican-controlled states and are a central part of right-wing rhetoric.
But these aren’t the only attacks. Over the past few years, Republican lawmakers across the country have passed “Don’t Say Gay” laws restricting the mention of LGBTQ+ topics in schools. They’ve banned books with LGBTQ+ themes and outlawed the display of pride flags in government buildings. And they’ve even made attempts to weaken the federal sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination protections established by the Supreme Court in 2020.
At the same time, they’ve scored Supreme Court victories over a parental right to opt their child out of school lessons that mention LGBTQ+ people, a private business’ “right” to deny wedding services to same-sex couples, and a private foster agency’s “right” to refuse to certify same-sex parents. Moreover, this year, the court seems poised to strike down laws banning conversion therapy on free speech grounds.
As such, many anti-LGBTQ+ groups now feel the time is right for another challenge to same-sex marriage. Last month, a broad coalition of “pro-family” organizations announced that, because same-sex marriage has led to “inequality for children,” they are now going to work towards getting the court to revisit its 2015 ruling—although it’s worth noting that the court recently rejected an appeal by Kim Davis that sought to overturn marriage equality.
HB 1473 is a key part of this renewed push, one its author, Tennessee Republican Rep. Gino Bulso, is no stranger to. In previous years, Bulso pushed bills that made Tennessee the first state to ban trans people from changing their IDs, broadened Tennessee’s bathroom restrictions, and banned gender-affirming care for minors. This year, Bulso is sponsoring bills that would ban pride flags, prohibit Tennessee courts from adopting the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Bostock for discrimination cases, and protect “religious liberty” in public schools—often construed to legalize harassment against queer people.
But one thing is clear: it’s never been about bathrooms, sports, “parental rights,” and gender-affirming care. And if Tennessee is any indication, Republicans are ready to begin their crusade against the rest of the rights the LGBTQ+ community has fought decades to obtain. And unless they are stopped, they will only continue to take. Now more than ever, the LGBTQ+ community must stand firmly against any further restrictions on our rights. Our future depends on it.
Thanks for your reporting, Aleksandra.
It is plainly obvious that “LGB without the T” was an utter failure of the mostly white, cis “pick-me” types to convince conservatives not to come after them (if such a movement was real to begin with, and not some astroturfed campaign put on by the right).
Using trans and nonbinary people as a bargaining chip got everyone precisely *nothing* except for a fractured coalition, a draconian crackdown on the mere existence of trans people, and an emboldened far right hellbent on mainstreaming bigotry against all marginalized people.
"Republicans are ready to begin their crusade against the rest of the rights the LGBTQ+ community has fought decades to obtain."
If only someone has been saying this for the last decade... they were never going to stop at trans people, we are just the testing ground and scapegoat.