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NASHVILLE, Tennessee (LifeSiteNews) — The Tennessee House of Representatives passed legislation on Thursday that would allow private citizens and organizations to refuse to recognize homosexual “marriages,” in a major challenge to the LGBT movement.
House Bill 1473, which cleared the state House 68-24 with overwhelming support from Republicans, would exempt banks, medical institutions, and other private entities from recognizing what the bill refers to as “a purported marriage between individuals of the same sex.”
The bill additionally states that government officials may not face discipline or sanctions for “declining to celebrate or officiate at a marriage or commitment ceremony that falls outside the definition of marriage provided in this code.”
The legislation pushes back against Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that legalized homosexual “marriage” nationwide.
“Private citizens and organizations are not bound by the Fourteenth Amendment or by the Supreme Court’s purported interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Obergefell v. Hodges,” House Bill 1473 says.
All Republicans in the Tennessee House voted for the measure, while all Democrats voted against it.
“It was the U.S. Supreme Court on June the 26th of 2015 that overstepped its bounds and invented this ‘right’ to marriage of individuals of the same sex, despite there being no support whatsoever in the language of the 14th Amendment for that proposition,” said Republican state Rep. Gino Bulso, who introduced the bill, according to local news.
“The court decided to redefine something that Almighty God had not given that court the authority to redefine,” Republican Rep. Monty Fritts also said.
The bill now has to pass the Republican-controlled state Senate, where it is being considered in the Judiciary Committee.
“The overwhelming majority of Tennesseans already affirmed what we have known for all of history: marriage is between one man and one woman,” Bulso said in a press release, referring to Tennessee’s 2006 Marriage Protection Amendment, which passed with 81 percent of the vote.
“This legislation protects religious liberty in the Volunteer State by clarifying that private citizens can never be forced to recognize any other definition. I’m grateful to my Republican colleagues for standing with me to defend the common-sense values that have shaped our state and nation,” he added.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation is hosting protests this weekend in Knoxville in opposition to the bill’s passage, according to WBIR.
Tennessee is known for taking action against LGBT ideology in recent years. The state has banned chemical and surgical “gender transitions” for minors, gender-confused males in female K-12 and college sports, drag shows in front of children, and more.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a law in 2024 allowing officials to refuse to “solemnize” so-called “marriages” between homosexuals.
The passage of House Bill 1473 comes amid growing backlash against homosexuality and the LGBT movement, with support for homosexual “marriage” declining significantly among Republican voters and the American public, according to recent polling.
Homosexuality also radically contradicts Christian values, which most Tennesseean profess to support and on which the United States was founded. The Bible condemns homosexuality as an “abomination” (Lev 18:22), a mortal sin (1 Cor 6:9-10), and a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance (Gen 18:20, 19:13).
The Catholic Church teaches that homosexual activity is gravely sinful and “intrinsically disordered” and that legislation attempting to equate homosexual unions with marriage is “gravely unjust.”
“There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family,” the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taught in a 2003 document approved by Pope St. John Paul II.
Raising children in a homosexual household, deprived of a mother or a father, “would actually mean doing violence to these children,” stresses the document, which was issued by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.
Indeed, homosexual “marriage” is particularly harmful to children, as demonstrated by several cases in the last few years of homosexuals arrested for abusing adopted children, trying to obtain children to abuse them, or otherwise committing child abuse.
THE GREAT AWAKENING ACCELERATES!!!
