Tennessee governor signs bill allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages
thehill.com
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed a bill Wednesday allowing public officials to refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
State lawmakers approved Tennessee House Bill 878 last week. The legislation states people “shall not be required to solemnize a marriage” if they refuse to doing so based on their “conscience or religious beliefs.” According to the Tennessee Legislature website, the governor signed the bill Wednesday.
Sounds like a good reason for queer people to start getting jobs as county clerks in Tennessee so they can refuse to solemnize cishet marriages based on their conscience or religious beliefs.
Ooooh this is a great idea!
They'd have to do it very stealthily though. Pretend to be die-hard cishet Republicans until after the election. Santos them, but go even further than Santos did by pretending you aren't even queer.
I will take time out of my day and thank you. Fucking SMORT! Get'em girls!
These people think about gay people more than gay people think about gay people.
That's only true if you assume these people aren't deeply closeted.
The GOP hate/persecution list:
HOMELESS, IMMIGRANTS, DRUG ADDICTS, BLACK PEOPLE MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY DISABLED PEOPLE, GAY PEOPLE, UNIONISTS, SOCIAL DEMOCRATS:
https://www.hmd.org.uk/learn-about-the-holocaust-and-genocides/nazi-persecution/
You don't have to leave out Jews just because they aren't the Nazis from Germany.
After all... "Jews will not replace us." Something said by those very nice people on one of the both sides.
(Muslims too, don't mean to leave you folks out, you're also victims of the Republican hate machine.)
They hate everyone. I don’t get how they still have support.
The people who vote for them are ignorant and angry, and the people who fund the gop are the only people who benefit from their policies.
They are currently just paying Trump's legal bills.
That's what the chumps are for
It would be quicker and more complete to list who they don't persecute.
That's a woefully incomplete list.
Didn't this already get knocked down in another state?
Edit: Kim Davis in Kentucky tried this and failed.
And is now fined over $100k for her bullshit LOL. Who's going to be the next idiot to throw their life savings away?
Life savings? Governor? No sir, that was a couple years' savings at most (I assume. Most politicians like that might not be paid EXTREME amounts for their public office, but their speaking engagements and stock portfolios are no joke)
Governor? She was a clerk.
Oh my bad, I thought we were still talking about governors and wasn't familiar with her
Nah, see, when politicians pass laws like this and cost the state massive amounts of time and money fighting over it in court, fuck-all happens to them. When a random state employee decides on her own one day, "fuck them queers" and acts on it, she gets consequences. Or at least, she used to. Goddess knows what to expect here going forward.
It's pretty easy to get registered to perform weddings in TN... And many other states.
Universal life Church is well known online ordination "place" that has been accepted with zero scrutiny in two other states by me and in TN by a friend.
I'll just leave this info here, do with it what you will.
What a great opportunity for the Supreme Court to uphold this law and then cry about how nobody thinks they're credible anymore.
Solemnizing a marriage = officiating
People can already refuse to officiate weddings, this bill is symbolic posturing
We don't care 'bout no constitution. We gon discriminate when and where we want, and you'd best not come after OurPreciousSecondAmendment, neither.
But seriously, they can't refuse to issue marriage permits, right?
Yes. This law is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause.
Of course they can. It's pretty clear laws are reactive so this will be tested 1000%.
just discrimination by adding 1 extra step.
If I was a state over I would be on top of this, never wanted to work in the government but this seems like a reason to stick my spanner in the works. They would be salty the times when I just dont feel like giving anyone a marriage, and I have a moral objection to...... rich men marrying younger females, ganna have to stick to my guns on that one too.
I can see all kinds of things to object to based on my conscience if I moved to Tennessee and got a job giving out marriage licenses!
Not enough sexual partners to know firmly if you two are sexually compatible? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
There's an age gap of more than four years between you? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
One or both of you already have children? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
You don't have the same blood type? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
Neither of you speak Swedish? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
You're white and Christian? Sorry, I'm going to have to object, on my conscience, to giving you a marriage license.
I really didn't think we'd move backwards like this, but here we are.
Progress often seems to be three steps forward, two steps back.
If you're that worried about it, then make it a form that people can fill out themselves. While we're at it, roll marriage agreements into contract law and remove the two-person cap.
That would come to close to achieving a middle ground, needs more obstruction and human suffering..
That last bit is such a ridiculously bad idea on so, so many levels.
First, as we have seen throughout history, any time multiple marriage is permitted, in practice it turns into polygyny, with a single man having multiple wives. This has a well-known destabilizing effect on societies. If you want to see what the practical result of having multiple marriages is, look at fundamentalist Mormons.
Second, from a legal standpoint, a divorce with just two people can already be incredibly complicated and expensive if one person is fighting it. If you add another person, it becomes vastly more complicated to legally sever.
There may be a gender cap then, no more than one person of each gender
Oh, that I'd be fine with.
Why does a man with multiple wives have a destabilizing effect on society?
Because--and this sounds icky--men with no options for mates tend to be more likely to engage in violent and antisocial behavior. When you look at fundamentalist Mormon communities, they end up making up reasons to excommunicate and expel young men from their communities so that they aren't competing with the Mormon elders for women. But those are largely isolated and small groups; once you expand that to an entire country, you end up needing to find a way to get rid of the competition in a more permanent way. Historically that's been war.
I can see how that would be a problem for a smaller, more insular religious community, but on a national scale you would have much more variation in relationships. Most people would probably still be monogamous, some would lean towards multiple wives, others multiple husbands, some more complex arrangements. The impact of any particular relationship pattern would be diluted by the size of the population.
When it's been legal on a country- or society-wide basis, the tendency has been for a relatively small number of very, very wealthy men to have a large number of wives, even while the majority of the remainder of the population has been monogamous. Women have--again, historically speaking--ended up being commodities.
The effects can be quite significant even if only a small number of people are practicing polygyny, particularly if you have a very small number of men that have a large number of wives (e.g., someone like Brigham Young who had 57 wives, or Warren Jeffs with 87 wives). If you look at relationships as a competition--which they very much are if you take a biological viewpoint--a single person like Warren Jeffs means that you have roughly 86 men that have no opportunities for partners at all.
Now imagine all 86 of those men becoming incels as a result, particularly in an age where it's easy for people to communicate their grievances and form communities online. Given that the US has been trending towards fewer rights for women (gee, thanks, Mr. Trump...), it's not hard to see women being fully commodified under a system that permitted polygamy or polygyny.
(To be clear: polygamy = multiple people in a marriage, with gender not specified, polyandry = one wife with multiple husbands, which has, AFAIK, only one historical analog (Joseph Smith Jr. notwithstanding, since his "spiritual marriages" were flatly illegal), and polygyny = one husband with multiple wives, which has many historical analogs. A single wife and many concubines is also fairly common; concubines were legally wives, but their children could not inherit position, wealth, or power from their father.)
I'm not sure that this would hold true if you made polygamy legal nationally today. While I agree that this has been the historical trend, it's also almost always been tied to high levels of religious fervency and few protections for women. While we can argue about whether the current situation on both fronts is trending one way or another, I think we can agree that it's certainly improved in the last century.
I doubt that a woman who wasn't living in a close-knit, isolated, religious community, would tolerate being in an exclusive relationship with a man who has 85 other wives.
I agree that treatment of women has trended towards better over the last century, but it appears that it is trending worse right now. And given that young men are becoming increasingly right-wing, I fear that this trend could continue. It's especially worrisome given that young men are trending to the right despite being less and less religious as a whole. We're seeing courts and legislatures erode many protections for women--especially in regards to reproductive rights--that had been the law of the land for nearly half a century in some cases. Obviously we're seeing a strong, sustained backlash against LGBTQ+ people, and that's even extending to opposition to things like legalizing interracial marriage.
I have known a number of women that have been trapped in unhappy and abusive relationships because they lacked the economic ability to leave. It's not far-fetched to imagine a wealthy person structuring a relationship to be economically punitive to any person that tried to exit. Shit, my ex-wife did her level best to bankrupt me and leave me homeless, and we were poor; if she'd had $50k to drop on an attorney, I would have been homeless. That's definitely a strong disincentive to leaving.
Abusive relationships aren't unique to polygamy. Assuming that they occur in polygamous relationships at roughly the same rate that they do in monogamous relationships, and that polygamous relationships are less common over all, I think it's unlikely that highly lopsided marriages would occur often enough that the number of single men would rise drastically and increase the likelihood of violence or civil unrest.
Even assuming that wealthy men, specifically, would acquire and maintain large harems of women who are dependent financially or otherwise, there's nothing stopping them from doing that now. All a marriage gets them is a higher risk of losing their wealth when one of their wives decides to leave.
Again: commodification. Wives as property. That's the problem, and the likely outcome of allowing polygamy. That's historically always been the problem, and given the way society appears to be going, that would likely be the problem.
47% of workers, 42% of managers, and roughly 62% of people engaged in polyamorous relationships are women. Women are financially, socially, and politically more powerful than at any time in the past, and if polyamorous relationships are anything to go by, then we should expect polygamous marriages to be skewed toward multiple men to each woman, rather than the other way around.
...You actually just demonstrated my point. If 62% percent of the people in polyamorous relationships are women, that means that there are fewer men 'monopolizing' more women. Socially, that's not a good thing. If you wanted to demonstrate that women had more power in relationships, you would need to show that there were fewer women in polyamorous relationship, e.g., that is was more common to have a single woman with multiple male partners, rather than a man with multiple female partners.
That is the face of a human who went wrong